DDRIE: Knowledge Access and Cumulative Innovation-Network Econometric Evidence from the Republic of Letters

This doctoral dissertation research will use a unique historical data collected by the researchers to investigate the effects of scientific knowledge flows on innovation. Economic growth in advanced economies is mainly innovation-driven, a processes that rely on previous discoveries as essential inputs. Efficient access to recently generated knowledge thus is important for economic growth.

Testing this theory is difficult because of lack of appropriate data. The researcher will use the resumption of scientific information between the UK and continental Europe in the intervening years between Nine Years War (1688-1697) and the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1714) to develop a citation index linking scientific knowledge in the earlier period to scientific knowledge in the earlier period.

The researchers will then use this data to assess how the information flow affected innovative activity afterwards. In addition to the research will develop a new and innovative methods that will allow them to draw a causal relationship from knowledge exchange to innovation. This research project permits the isolation of the innovation effects induced from changes in a communication channel.

The results could provide inputs to design efficient intellectual property rights protection policies and thus maintain the US as the global leader in innovation.

The proposed research project investigates how the re-establishment of the packet boat service between Dover and Calais in the period of peace intervening the Nine Years' War (1688-1697) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) affected the formation of citation-based links within a network of influential scholars. Citation data from the earliest two academic journals will determine the link structure of the network and make the links indicative of cumulative innovation: If A cited B, then A used the existing knowledge of B to create something new.

War-related turmoil in the English Channel did not obstruct bilateral exchange between all scholars. Considering each possible pair of scholars as a separate cross-sectional unit gives rise to a quasi-experimental setting. The control group contains initially unaffected pairs and the treatment group pairs those who benefited directly from the re-establishment of the cross-channel service.

A new econometric approach exploits network-induced variation to estimate the effect of unobservable knowledge flows from pairs in the treatment to pairs in the control group. The average treatment effect on the treated pairs is identified by comparing the two groups' pre- to post-period changes in the linking probability. The empirical analysis requires an extensive set of geo-referenced network panel data.

The data set permits the study of different research questions and testing of new methods. The results could provide inputs to design efficient intellectual property rights protection policies and thus maintain the US as the global leader in innovation.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.