The regional balance of knowledge flows

This work applies a new approach to measure knowledge spillovers. Assuming that citation linkages between articles imply a flow of knowledge from the cited to the citing authors, we investigate the geographic flows of scientific knowledge among Italian regions at both overall and field level. Compared to other contributions proposed in the literature, the recourse to publication citations rather than patent citations offers more precise and robust results. Findings show that larger regions in terms of research output are more likely net exporters of new knowledge. At the same time, we register a positive correlation between the share of intraregional spillovers and the size of overall scientific output of a region.