03.06.2020Patrick Lehnert successfully defended his doctoral thesis. Congratulations!

Patrick Lehnert has successfully defended his dissertation titled "Higher Education Institutions and Their Impact on Employment and Innovation: Regional Identification and Empirical Analyses".

In his thesis he investigates how Universities of Applied Sciences in Switzerland or Germany affect regional innovation through their formation of human capital and through knowledge complementarities with other types of research institutions such as Max Planck or Fraunhofer Institutes. To identify these effects, he derives a novel proxy for regional economic activity from daytime satellite imagery to econometrically adjust for the endogeneity in German UAS locations. His results show firms in UAS regions significantly increase their employment in R&D. Moreover, knowledge complementarities with other research institutions increase the UASs' capabilities for increasing regional innovation.