University Research and Regional Innovation

This text represents a study in the literature that provides a systematic, US-wide analysis of local university-high technology connections at the lowest possible level of spatial aggregation. Its contributions are twofold: it focuses on the regional aspects of the interaction between high technology innovations, university and private R&D at the proper spatial scale, at the level of counties and metropolitan areas; and it uses the specialized methodology of spatial econometrics to explicitly deal with potential spatial effects in cross-sectional data. The study is based on a data set of high technology innovations and industrial R&D employment in the USA in 1982. From an exploratory spatial data analysis implemented at the county level, it is shown that the concentration of high technology product innovations, private R&D and university research follow a similar spatial pattern across the United States. A formal regression analysis is carried out for 43 States and 125 Metropolitan Statistical Areas which implements the Griliches-Jaffe knowledge production function framework.This provides strong evidence that university research expenditures have a positive and very significant effect on aggregate high technology innovation. However, the intensity of knowledge transfers between university research and regional innovation is not constant over space. It is demonstrated that the same amount of university research expenditure yields substantially different levels of local innovation activity depending on the concentration of economic activities in the metropolitan area. The findings in this book strongly indicate that a stimulation of research activities in universities located in existing agglomerations of high technology production and research has significant positive effects on the regional economy. This book aims to serve the interests of both academic researchers in the fields of regional science and economics of technological change, and economic developers concerned with practical problems of innovative technology regions. The text may be used in graduate-level courses of regional economics, economics of technological change, economics of education, and applied spatial econometrics.