Inter-regional highly skilled worker mobility and technological novelty

Focusing on inter-regional mobility, this paper explores the relationship between the inflow of highly skilled workers and the production of technological novelty, measured as the occurrence of new combinations of technology subclasses. Based on French workers' occupational mobility and patent data, we build an aggregated sample at the level of 22 French regions over the period 1996-2017. We find that workers coming from regions specialized in a given technology subclass drive technological novelty in the same subclass at destination. This effect is present only for subclasses related to the local technological portfolio at destination and is both present for reuse and creation-type novelties. Results imply that local absorptive capacity and a complementarity between internal dynamics and exogenous drivers are important for regions to upgrade their technological space.