Elad Passi*, Olivia Tsoutsoplidi**

*Economists have long suspected that ideas travel with people, yet formal growth models typically assume that R&D labour reallocates without frictions, while search-and-matching models of the labour market rarely incorporate innovation. I develop a theoretical model in which scientists move across a network of scientific sectors. The mobility of a scientist to a new sector leads to knowledge diffusion in the economy, but it can simultaneously hurt the sector the scientist leaves, which loses a potentially productive researcher. I show that there exists an optimal level of scientists’ mobility and that the structure of the network is crucial for knowledge diffusion and long-run growth. I then relate the model’s predictions to the observed differences in the slowdown of productivity and output growth in Europe relative to the United States. In the model, a more flexible labour market with higher turnover (more job switching) can generate faster growth than a more rigid labour market with low mobility. The novel policy implication is to highlight how tools from labour economics—such as unemployment insurance design, training programs, labour-market regulations, and contractual arrangements—can be powerful levers for innovation policy.

**This paper studies coordination over a focal issue -women’s voting rights- within a constituency heterogeneous along a given dimension (e.g., income), and how it responds to collective action on a second, dimension-aligned issue - labor rights. The setting is early-20th-century France, during the emergence of an organized women’s suffrage movement. I assemble a commune-by-year panel of local membership in the national suffrage association (1909-1940) paired with measures of unionization and striking activity (1884-1940). I first document some stylized facts about the organizational capacity, dynamics, and efficiency of the suffrage movement. I then estimate its relationship to the labor movement using a Bartik-style shift-share instrumental-variables strategy for changes in local unionization patterns. In subsequent iterations, I develop a collective-action framework in which agents endowed with two traits allocate finite resources across two issues, yielding testable implications for cross-issue spillovers and coordination.