Article

Indirect and feedback effects as measure of knowledge spillovers in French regions

Thibault Laurent, and Inès Moussa

Abstract

The aim of this article is to provide a precise measure of the role of geographical proximity in the innovation process on the French metropolitan NUTS (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) 3 regions over the period 1995 to 2008. We study the relationship between patents applications and internal R&D, and we propose a spatial decomposition coefficient of the independent variables to measure more explicitly the spatial extent of knowledge spillovers (LeSage and Pace, 2009). Our estimation result shows that the internal R&D expenditures have a positive direct and indirect effect on the patents applications, but only for the regions with a strong innovation activity. For these regions, the spillover effect is observed in the first-order neighbourhood, but the spatial lag coefficient is not significant enough to get a positive feedback effect.

Keywords

knowledge spillovers; spatial econometrics; innovation; indirect effect;

Reference

Thibault Laurent, and Inès Moussa, Indirect and feedback effects as measure of knowledge spillovers in French regions, Applied Economics Letters, vol. 22, n. 7, 2015, pp. 511–514.

See also

Published in

Applied Economics Letters, vol. 22, n. 7, 2015, pp. 511–514