Innovation on Wings: Nonstop Flights and Firm Innovation in the Global Context
Better air connectivity between locations causally increases firm-driven cross-border patenting and citations, especially for firms with strong existing innovation capacity in leading technology hubs.
Summary
Bahar, Choudhury, Kim, and Koo use global flight data and a regression discontinuity design to show that a ten percent increase in nonstop flights between two locations raises collaborative patenting by 1.4 percent and citations by 3.4 percent, an effect concentrated in firms rather than universities. They find the effect is strongest for firms with large stocks of inventors and R&D spending located in innovation hubs, and for pairs of locations
Editor's opinion
Rigorous causal design, but too narrow (air-connectivity/patenting mechanism) to be a firm-strategy insight.
Key concepts
Nonstop flights · Global connectivity · Cross-border innovation