Outward R&D and Knowledge Spillovers: Evidence Using Patent Citations

FDI is believed to be a conduit of new technologies between countries. Many have studied the cross-border knowledge diffusion due to outward FDI, but this paper is the first to study the advantages of outward FDI for the home country of multinationals conducting R&D abroad. To address this issue, we use patent citations as a proxy for technology spillovers and we bring empirical evidence that supports the hypothesis that a US subsidiary conducting R&D overseas facilitates the flow of knowledge between its host and home countries.patents, spillovers, R&D, FDI