TY - JOUR AU - Kim, Jinyoung AU - Lee, Sangjoon John AU - Marschke, Gerald TI - International Knowledge Flows: Evidence from an Inventor-Firm Matched Data Set JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 12692 PY - 2006 Y2 - November 2006 DO - 10.3386/w12692 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12692 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12692.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Jinyoung Kim Department of Economics Korea University 5-1, Anam-Dong, Sungbuk-Ku Seoul, Korea 136-701 Tel: 011-82-2-3290-2202 Fax: 011-82-2-3290-2202 E-Mail: jinykim@korea.ac.kr Sangjoon Lee Alfred University One Saxon Drive Alfred NY 14802 Tel: 607-871-2434 E-Mail: sangjoon@alfred.edu Gerald R. Marschke State University of New York at Albany Economics Department 1400 Washington Avenue Albany, NY 12222 E-Mail: gerald.marschke@gmail.com M1 - published as Jinyoung Kim, Sangjoon John Lee, Gerald Marschke. "International Knowledge Flows: Evidence from an Inventor-Firm Matched Data Set," in Richard B. Freeman and Daniel Goroff, editors, "Science and Engineering Careers in the United States: An Analysis of Markets and Employment" University of Chicago Press (2009) M3 - presented at "Science and Engineering Workforce Project (SEWP)", October 19-20, 2005 AB - We describe the construction of a panel data set from the U.S. patent data that contains measures of inventors' life-cycle R&D productivity--patents and patent citations. We match the data set to information on the U.S. pharmaceutical and semiconductor firms for whom they work. In this paper we use these data to examine the role of research personnel as a pathway for the diffusion of ideas from foreign countries to U.S. innovators. In particular, we find in recent years an increase in the extent that U.S. innovating firms collaborate with or employ researchers with foreign experience. This increase appears to work primarily through an increase in U.S. firms' employment of foreign-residing researchers; the fraction of research-active U.S. residents with foreign research experience appears to be falling, suggesting that U.S. pharmaceutical and semiconductor firms are increasingly locating operations in foreign countries to employ such researchers, as opposed to such researchers immigrating to the U.S. to work. In addition, we investigate which U.S. firms conducting R&D build upon innovations originating abroad. We find that employing or collaborating with researchers who have research experience abroad seems to facilitate the use of output of non-U.S. R&D. We also find that in the semiconductor industry smaller and older firms, and in the pharmaceutical industry, younger firms are more likely to access foreign R&D output. ER -