No 2021/4 Innovation in Malmö after the Öresund Bridge

Abstract

We analyse the effect of the Öresund Bridge, a combined railway and motorway bridge between Swedish Malmö and the Danish capital Copenhagen, on inventive activity in the region of Malmö. Applying difference-in-difference estimation on individual level data, our findings suggest that the Öresund Bridge has led to a significant increase in the number of patents per individual with a background prone to patenting in the Malmö region as compared to the Gothenburg and Stockholm regions. Further, we show that the dominating mechanism is the attraction of highly qualified workers to the Malmö region following the construction of the bridge.