International trade and R&D spillovers

Departing from the usual tenets of proportionality between cross-border trade flows and knowledge spillovers, we investigate whether relatively intense trade relationships are associated with particularly large international R&D spillovers. A nonlinear specification nesting the hypothesis of global and trade-unrelated R&D spillovers is estimated on a sample of 24 advanced countries over 1971-2004. We find evidence that trade patterns positively affect the international transmission of knowledge, in particular when we consider bilateral trade flows that, thanks to the estimation of an auxiliary gravity model, are normalized for the size and the distance of the trading partners. Finally, we discuss the patterns of the bilateral relationships characterized by both relatively intense trade and large R&D spillovers. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.