Sanctions and Global Collaboration in Innovative Activities

ABSTRACT Sanctions are one of the most prominent tools in international politics, designed to influence the target countries' policies by inflicting economic damage. Sanctions may also interfere with collaborative research relationships between countries, reducing knowledge diffusion and growth. In this paper, we study the impact of travel sanctions on patents that contain multiple inventors that are located in more than one country. Using a gravity model framework that includes 173 countries over 43 years, we find that travel sanctions negatively impact international patent collaboration. Specifically, travel sanctions reduce the intensity of collaboration by 43%. This impact only occurs during the sanctioning period, is persistent even in distant country pairs and is partially moderated by the availability of telecommunication technology.