IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/21601.html

Innovation without Borders? The Geography of Technological Diffusion

Author

Listed:
  • Baumann, Ursel
  • Cullen, Zöe
  • Faia, Ester
  • Ferrando, Annalisa
  • Perez-Truglia, Ricardo
  • Rariga, Judith

Abstract

How well does innovation diffuse across geographic boundaries? To shed light on this question, we present a large-scale field experiment involving 3,300 firms across twelve European Union (EU) countries. We elicit firms' perceptions of the share of similar firms in their own country that had invested in AI, as well as the corresponding share among similar firms in the three largest EU economies. We randomly provide half of the sample with accurate information about both domestic and foreign AI investment. We show that firms substantially underestimate competitors' current AI investment, both domestically and abroad, and that they update their expectations about competitors' future adoption in response to the information treatment. The treatment also causes a statistically significant increase in firms' own expected AI investment rate (p-value

Suggested Citation

  • Baumann, Ursel & Cullen, Zöe & Faia, Ester & Ferrando, Annalisa & Perez-Truglia, Ricardo & Rariga, Judith, 2026. "Innovation without Borders? The Geography of Technological Diffusion," CEPR Discussion Papers 21601, Centre for Economic Policy Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:21601
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP21601
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;

    JEL classification:

    • O33 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes
    • D22 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Firm Behavior: Empirical Analysis
    • C93 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Field Experiments
    • L21 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Business Objectives of the Firm

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:21601. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CEPR (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://cepr.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.