Should auld acquaintance be forgot? the reverse transfer of knowledge through mobility ties
研究了员工流出企业如何从流入企业获取知识，发现半导体行业员工流出后，流出企业更可能引用流入企业的专利，表明知识流动是双向的，且地理距离远时效应更显著。
Abstract While mobility's effect on knowledge transfer to firms that hire mobile employees is well demonstrated, we choose to explore mobility's effect on knowledge transfer to firms that lose these employees. Focusing on this ‘outbound mobility’ allows us to isolate effects of social mechanisms associated with mobility. We find that semiconductor firms losing employees are more likely to subsequently cite patents of firms hiring these employees, suggesting that mobility‐driven knowledge flows are bidirectional. In addition, the outbound mobility effect is pronounced when mobility occurs between geographically distant firms, but attenuates for geographically proximate firms since other redundant knowledge channels exist within regions. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.