Internet Adoption and Knowledge Diffusion

What is the capacity of ICT to reduce the (geographical and technological) localization of knowledge? In this paper, we analyze the impact of Internet adoption within US firms on knowledge spillovers. More specifically, we investigate the impact of basic Internet access on the likelihood that patents in-vented at a given R&D establishment cite patents invented elsewhere within the same firm. Our find-ings suggest that adoption of Internet significantly fosters cross-location citations in a significant way, and that these effects are proportional to the technologically proximity of the establishments. This positive effect holds even when excluding collaborative patents or controlling for earlier collaborations, and suggests that Internet adoption has helped in reducing the spatial localization of knowledge but not in the ability to draw from new knowledge sources (i.e., across different technological areas)