Fernando STIPANICIC MÁRQUEZ will defend his thesis on Monday 11 July at 2:30 PM Auditorium 3 and Zoom
"Essays on International Trade and Innovation"
Supervisor: Professor Christian HELLWIG
To attend the conference, please contact the secretariat Elvire Jalran
Memberships are:
- M. Christian HELLWIG, Toulouse School of Economics - Universite Toulouse 1 Capitole, Supervisor
- M. Mark SCHANKERMAN, London School of Economics, Rapporteur
- M. Marti MESTIERI, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Rapporteur
- M. Saleh MOHAMED, Toulouse School of Economics - Universite Toulouse 1 Capitole, Examinatreur
Abstract :
The Creation and Diffusion of Knowledge: Evidence from the Jet Age
This paper provides new causal evidence of the impact of air travel time on the creation and diffusion of knowledge. We exploit the beginning of the Jet Age as a quasi-natural experiment. We digitize airlines' historical flight schedules and construct a novel data set of the flight network in the United States. Between 1951 and 1966, travel time between locations more than 2,000 km apart decreased on average by 41%. The reduction in travel time explains 33% of the increase in knowledge diffusion as measured by patent citations. The increase in knowledge diffusion further caused an increase in the creation of new knowledge. The results provide evidence that jet airplanes led to innovation convergence across locations and contributed to the shift in innovation activity towards the South and the West of the United States.
Historical Air Travel Times: United States
In this paper we present a novel dataset of air travel times in the United States. We have digitized and web-scrapped information on airlines' flight schedules for 13 years in approximately five year intervals covering the period 1951 to 1999. The dataset contains 755 airports and 11,058 directed airport-pair links. We document that between 1951 and 1999, the big drop in travel time of non-stop flights occurred in the period 1956-1961 with the introduction of jet airplanes. We also document the appearance of long-range flights in 1970. Using airline information, we show the expansion of American Airlines and the development of its hubs. We propose to study the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 as a policy change that may have driven the change from a point-to-point to a hub-and-spoke network.
The Geography of Innovation: France 1978-2010
In this paper we present a series of facts on the geographic distribution of patenting activity in France in the period 1978 to 2010. During this period we observe that the share of multi-inventor patents that have inventors in multiple departments increased from 38% to 47%. At the same time, the share of those patents with at least one inventor in Paris decreased from 35% to 30%. Therefore, across-department patent collaboration increased at a national level but diverted away from Paris. We also observe that the share of inventors that year-on-year migrate to or from Paris increases over time. These phenomena happened simultaneously with the expansion of high speed railways. We construct a new dataset of yearly train travel time across departments' capitals. Between 1980 and 2018, the introduction of high speed railways led to an average decrease in travel time of more than 20% for capital-pairs located more than 400km apart. We plan to study how changes in travel time affect inventors' collaborations, inventors' teams characteristics and inventors' mobility.
