We study the innovation effects of the Agreement on the Free Movement of Persons, signed by Switzerland and the European Union in 1999. We exploit a quasi-experimental setting created by Switzerland’s implementation policy, which initially eased entry restrictions only for commuters from neighboring countries, thereby inducing a large inflow of "cross-border inventors" in regions close to the border. We find that this policy increased patenting in these regions relative to comparable ones farther away from the border. Additionally, we find no evidence indicating the displacement of native inventors or a reduction in the patenting activity of Switzerland's neighboring countries. We also provide evidence suggesting that cross-border inventors contributed to Swiss patenting by enabling R&D laboratories to expand and hire inventors with valuable skills, who increased the productivity of incumbent inventors they collaborated with, but not of local peers outside direct collaborations.

This study introduces in-text patent-to-patent citations—references embedded in the body of patent documents—as a novel data source to trace knowledge flows. Unlike front-page citations, which often reflect legal requirements, in-text citations are more likely to originate from inventors and signal meaningful technological linkages. We show that they exhibit stronger geographic and semantic proximity, greater self-referentiality, and closer alignment with inventor knowledge. Though less frequent than front-page citations, they yield robust results in models of knowledge diffusion. We release a validated dataset and reproducible code to support future research. Our findings offer new opportunities for strategy scholars interested in the microfoundations of innovation, the geography of knowledge flows, and the role of inventors in shaping firms’ knowledge trajectories.

This paper studies the effects of the NSF Science Development Program on universities and local innovation, combining historical data from scientific publications, doctoral dissertations, and patents. Introduced in 1965, the program awarded large institutional grants to natural science and engineering departments at U.S. research universities. I exploit top-ranked universities excluded from the program as a comparison group in a difference-in-differences research design. First, I find that Science Development awards increased faculty size, the number of PhDs awarded, and publications at funded universities. Second, I find a patenting increase in commuting zones hosting funded universities, primarily attributable to incumbent firms located near those institutions, and driven by commuting zones with established R&D-intensive sectors. I find a larger effect in technology fields with high exposure to local universities' research. I provide evidence indicating two main mechanisms behind the patenting increase: greater reliance on scientific knowledge in patenting and the employment of local PhD graduates in industrial R&D.

Patents disclose knowledge, yet this disclosure is often insufficient for the knowledge to be put into practice and used for cumulative innovation. Firms rely on workers possessing tacit knowledge or specific skills to effectively build on the ideas of others. In this study, we examine the effects of expanding Swiss firms' access to the German labor market on the diffusion of knowledge developed in Germany to Switzerland. We investigate the impact of a reform implemented in 2002, which eliminated the restrictions Swiss firms previously faced in hiring German cross-border commuters. We find that following the reform's implementation, German patents originating from locations within close commuting distance to the Swiss-German border are more heavily cited by Swiss applicants. Moreover, we observe an increase in the number of new Swiss patents that are textually similar to patents from the German border region. Knowledge diffusion effects are particularly pronounced for cumulative innovation at an intermediate technological distance to the original German invention. Such inventions introduce at least one new technology field of application while having at least one common field. Additionally, we find that the effects are concentrated in fields where Switzerland is relatively closer to the knowledge frontier than the neighboring German regions.