ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on disentangling the impact of geographical spatial distance and territorial unit borders on the localization of knowledge spillovers. Overall the results are consistent with previous contributions, such as Belenzon and Schankerman and Singh and Marx, who have claimed that territorial borders can be expression of more general conditions than solely the distance effect. Moreover, the chapter analyses that how the strength of the national legislation on patent protection mediates the impact of territorial borders on knowledge spillovers. In line with the background literature. The chapter relies on patent citations as a measure of knowledge spillovers and a novel dataset has been developed by drawing information from various sources. Future research could advance in multiple directions. Other controls could include measures of closeness to science, basicness of the invention, and generality index that proxies the technological breadth of spillovers from patents.
