Firm R&D investment and export market exposure

We study differences in the returns to R&D investment between German manufacturing firms that sell in international markets and firms that only sell in the domestic market. Using firm-level data for five high-tech manufacturing sectors, we estimate a dynamic structural model of a firm's discrete decision to invest in R&D and use it to measure the difference in expected long-run benefit from R&D investment for exporting and domestic firms. The results show that R&D investment leads to higher rates of product and process innovation among exporting firms and these innovations have a larger economic return in export market sales than domestic market sales. As a result of this higher payoff to R&D investment, exporting firms invest in R&D more frequently than domestic firms, and this endogenously generates higher rates of productivity growth. We use the model to simulate the introduction of export and import tariffs on German exporters, and find that a 20 % export tariff reduces the long-run payoff to R&D by 24.2 to 46.9 % for the median firm across the five industries. Overall, export market sales contribute significantly to the firm's return on R&D investment which, in turn, raises future firm value, providing a source of dynamic gains from trade.     

Competition favors the prepared firm: Firms’ R&D responses to competitive market pressure

This paper aims to contribute to the literature on the long-debated relationship between market competition and firm research and development (R&D) by investigating the effect of competitive market pressure on firms’ incentives to invest in R&D. The paper shows that a firm's R&D response to competitive market pressure depends primarily on its level of technological competence or R&D productivity: firms with high levels of technological competence tend to respond aggressively (i.e., exhibit a higher level of R&D efforts) to intensifying competitive market pressure, while firms with low levels of technological competence tend to respond submissively (i.e., exhibit a lower level of R&D efforts). The differential effect of competitive market pressure on firm R&D, conditioned primarily by the level of firms’ technological competence, is empirically supported by unique firm-level data from the World Bank. Furthermore, the role of firm-specific technological competence in conditioning the R&D-competition relationship is more evident and statistically more significant for firms facing consumers whose utility is relatively more elastic to product quality than to price.     

R&D co-operation and innovation a microeconometric study on French firms

The scope of this paper is to report new empirical evidence on the determinants of R&D co-operation. Indeed, the literature on the capabilities of firms emphasises the role of knowledge in the performance and evolution of firms who use knowledge developed in others to build their own knowledge capital. R&D co-operation between firms is one of the many strategies by which this knowledge may be transmitted. Several theoretical models have stressed that R&D co-operation is more likely when the level of spillovers is high. While this supposition is used in many theoretical models, it has rarely been tested before. Our results do not lend strong support to this intuition. Indeed, our spillover variables (national pure spillovers, national rent spillovers and imports of machine tools), which were supposed to match the theoretical notion of spillovers used in these theoretical models have a positive but not a significant role when explaining R&D co-operation. The R&D co-operation increases with size and with R&D intensity, but not with market share. It also increases with the budget spent on paying license fees and on acquiring patents and labour from foreign firms. In this study, we also analyse the determinants of innovation. In more precise terms, we compare the effects of R&D co-operation to those played by traditional internal factors and those exerted by external, pure and rent spillovers on the innovation capacity of the firms. Our results show that the commercial success of innovations of French firms depends mainly on size, market share, R&D intensity and human capital. Inward FDI from industrialised countries exerts a positive and significant effect. The finding highlights the important role of the absorptive capacity of firms. Spillover measurements, such as the acquisition of machine tools, foreign patents, licenses, and technological opportunities have a positive impact on innovation.     

Do public subsidies stimulate private R&D spending?

The objective of this paper is to contribute to the empirical literature that evaluates the effects of public R&D support on private R&D investment. We apply a matching approach to analyze the effects of public R&D support in Spanish manufacturing firms. We examine whether or not the effects are different depending on the size of the firm and the technological level of the sectors in which the firms operate. We evaluate the effect of R&D subsidies on the subsidized firms, considering both the effect of subsidies on firms that would have performed R&D in the absence of public support and also the effect of inducement to undertake R&D activities. We also analyze the effect that concession of subsidies might have on firms which do not enjoy this type of support. The main conclusions indicate absence of “crowding-out”, either full or partial, between public and private spending and that some firms - mainly small and operating in low technology sectors - might not have engaged in R&D activities in the absence of subsidies.     

Do firms in clusters invest in R&D more intensively? Theory and evidence from multi-country data

This study aims to evaluate whether firms located in clusters invest more intensively in research and development (R&D) than their non-clustered counterparts. Specifically, it proposes a model of firm R&D and tests empirically its implications for the effect of being located in a cluster on firm R&D intensity. The key ideas underlying the theory are as follows: (1) due either to natural excludability or to a high degree of stickiness of R&D-opportunity-bearing technological knowledge, geographical proximity per se is limited in the (automatic) spillover of knowledge with promising R&D opportunities to nearby firms; (2) geographical proximity may, however, help enhance the effectiveness or efficiency of knowledge exchange through market mechanisms (e.g., through contract R&D, R&D collaboration); (3) potential advantages (or disadvantages) in firm R&D of being located in a cluster also depend on the degree of asymmetry in technological competence among firms located in the cluster. The key ideas are supported by an empirical analysis of a multi-industry, multi-country data set compiled by the World Bank. In particular, the results show that being located in a cluster per se actually has a negative effect on firm R&D intensity, which is in contrast to the conventional wisdom of pure or automatic localized knowledge spillovers, as far as firm R&D intensity is concerned.     

Sitting on the Fence: Integrating the two worlds of scientific discovery and invention within the firm

Applying a within-firm perspective to the topic of the division of innovative labor, I explore the organization of scientific discovery at the firm level — specialized or integrated with invention. Using data on inventors and authors related to U.S. publicly-traded science-performing firms for the period 1980–2015, the paper deepens our understanding of the determinants and the tradeoffs associated with the strategic choice of scientific discovery organization. I show that integration is related to a tradeoff between short-term applied R&D and long-term fundamental R&D; while integration is beneficial for invention, it has adverse effects on its scientific output, which decrease invention in the long run. The negative relationship between integration and publication reduces the direct increase in patents due to integration by approximately 90%. To better understand firms’ R&D organizational choice, I present internal and external factors that have implications on the benefits and costs associated with integration: reliance on science, stage of technology, external market for technology, and R&D spillins. Finally, I present consistent implications in terms of market value and show that value creation is related to organizational structure.     

Competition among vortex firms: Marketing,R&D or pricing strategy

The mathematical model determines how firms can leverage their advantages to increase their market share. Represented as vortex, firms increase their market scope using: marketing expenses strategy, R&D expenditure strategy or price reduction strategy. For an overpriced good, the R&D strategy is required if sector marketing velocity growth is low otherwise the pricing strategy is suited. Conversely, for an underpriced good, the R&D strategy is used when sector marketing velocity growth is high, but when it is low, the pricing strategy is followed. Distance between firms, competitor marketing velocity and related services share contribute or limit these strategies.     

The lag structure of the relationship between patenting and internal R&D revisited

The principal purpose of this study is to revisit the classic research question regarding the lag structure of the patents–R&D relationship through an examination of the impact of internal R&D on firm patenting in the context of the global pharmaceutical industry during 1986–2000. Our empirical analysis, using both a multiplicative distributed lag model and a dynamic linear feedback model, differs from previous work that examines the patents–R&D relationship in three aspects. First, our estimation results exhibit direct evidence on lagged R&D effects, with the first lag (t − 1) of R&D being significant in all distributed lag specifications. Second, a U-shaped lag structure of the patents–R&D relationship is found in most estimations of the multiplicative distributed lag model, which suggests a potential long-run effect of internal R&D investments on firm patenting. Finally, the results from the dynamic linear feedback model coincide with those from the multiplicative distributed lag model, indicating not only lag effects from more recent R&D but also an overall long-run effect of internal R&D investments in the distant past on the knowledge production or innovation process of incumbent pharmaceutical firms.     

Schumpeter's legacy: A new perspective on the relationship between firm size and R&D

This paper shows that firm heterogeneity in technological competence, rather than differences in industry-specific characteristics, is the primary condition determining the long-debated relationship between firm size and R&D. Specifically, by utilizing a formal model of firm R&D that shows that profit-maximizing firm R&D intensity is determined jointly by firm-specific technological competence and consumer preference regarding quality and price, this paper suggests that firm size affects firm R&D intensity not directly, but through its influence on firm-specific technological competence. In particular, four predictions are drawn and tested empirically: (1) in general, the size-R&D relationship is less-than-proportional or inverted U-shaped, especially for low-technological-competence firms; (2) however, the common less-than-proportional relationship disappears, and a more-than-proportional relationship becomes increasingly likely, for firms with high levels of technological competence, plausibly due to competence-enhancing, learning economies of scale and/or scope in R&D; (3) firms with larger accumulated R&D experience are, ceteris paribus, less likely to exhibit the common less-than-proportional relationship; (4) among industries, a greater within-industry departure from the proportional size-R&D relationship is expected for industries with seemingly high, rapidly changing technological-opportunity conditions. These predictions, especially pertaining to the conditioning role of technological competence in the size-R&D relationship, are empirically supported by the unique data by the World Bank.     

Money for nothing: How firms have financed R&D-projects since the Industrial Revolution

We investigate the long-run historical pattern of R&D-outlays by reviewing aggregate growth rates and historical cases of particular R&D projects, following the historical-institutional approach of Chandler (1962), North (1981) and Williamson (1985). We find that even the earliest R&D-projects used non-insignificant cash outlays and that until the 1970s aggregate R&D outlays grew far faster than GDP, despite five well-known challenges that implied that R&D could only be financed with cash, for which no perfect market existed: the presence of sunk costs, real uncertainty, long time lags, adverse selection, and moral hazard. We then review a wide variety of organisational forms and institutional instruments that firms historically have used to overcome these financing obstacles, and without which the enormous growth of R&D outlays since the nineteenth century would not have been possible.     

R&D cooperation and innovation activities of firms—evidence for the German manufacturing industry

The aim of the paper is to investigate in a simultaneous equation framework the role of R&D cooperation in the innovation process—in context with other factors—from two specific aspects. First, analysis focuses on the impact of R&D cooperation on firms’ innovation input and output. Second, analysis is undertaken as to how the number of cooperation partners affects the innovation behaviour of firms. Starting with the discussion of theoretically expected effects of successful R&D cooperation on the innovation activities of firms, the importance of inter-organizational arrangements in R&D is empirically investigated in respect of firms in the German manufacturing industry. The estimation results can be summarized as follows: joint R&D is used to complement internal resources in the innovation process, enhancing the innovation input and output measured by the intensity of in-house R&D or the realization of product innovations. On the input side, the intensity of in-house R&D also stimulates the probability and the number of joint R&D activities with other firms and institutions significantly.     

R&D strategies and entrepreneurial spawning

This paper analyzes how different R&D strategies of incumbent firms affect the quantity and quality of their entrepreneurial spawning. When examining entrepreneurial ventures of ex-employees of firms with different R&D strategies, three things emerge: First, firms with persistent R&D investments and a general superiority in sales, exports, productivity, profitability and wages are less likely to generate entrepreneurs than firms with temporary or no R&D investments. Second, start-ups from knowledge intensive business service (KIBS) firms with persistent R&D investments have a significantly increased probability of survival. No corresponding association between the R&D strategies of incumbents and survival of entrepreneurial spawns is found for incumbents in manufacturing sectors. Third, spin-outs from KIBS-firms are more likely to survive if they start in the same sector, indicating the importance of inherited knowledge. These findings suggest that R&D intensive firms are less likely to generate employee start-ups, but their entrepreneurial spawns tend to be of higher quality.     

The value of innovation: The interaction of competition, R&D and IP

This paper analyses market valuations of UK companies using a new data set of their R&D and IP activities (1989-2002). In contrast to previous studies, the analysis is conducted at the sectoral-level, where the sectors are based on the technological classification originating from Pavitt [Pavitt, K., 1984. Sectoral patterns of technical change. Research Policy 13, 343-373]. The first main result is that the valuation of R&D varies substantially across these sectors. Another important result is that, on average, firms that receive only UK patents tend to have no significant market premium. In direct contrast, patenting through the European Patent Office does raise market value, as does the registration of trade marks in the UK for most sectors. To explore these variations the paper links competitive conditions with the market valuation of innovation. Using profit persistence as a measure of competitive pressure, we find that the sectors that are the most competitive have the lowest market valuation of R&D. Furthermore, within the most competitive sector (‘science based’ manufacturing), firms with larger market shares (an inverse indicator of competitive pressure) also have higher R&D valuations, as well as some positive return to UK patents. We conclude that this evidence supports Schumpeter by finding higher returns to innovation in less than fully competitive markets and contradicts Arrow [Arrow, K., 1962. Economic welfare and the allocation of resources for invention. In: Nelson, R. (Ed.), The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity. Princeton University Press, Princeton], who argued that, with the existence of IP rights, competitive market structure provides higher incentives to innovate.     

What determines the location choice of R&D activities by multinational firms?

We analyse 446 location decisions of R&D activities by multinational firms incorporated in the European Union over 1999–2006. Our results suggest that on average, the location probability of a representative R&D foreign affiliate increased with agglomeration economies from foreign R&D activities, human capital, proximity to centres of research excellence and the research and innovation capacity of the region. Further, our evidence suggests that in comparison to European multinational firms, the effects of patents intensity and proximity to centres of research excellence were stronger in the case of North American multinational firms. While government R&D expenditure intensity increased the probability of location of R&D activities by European multinational firms in the region, it did not have a significant effect on the probability of location of R&D activities by North American multinational firms.     

Investments in modernization, innovation and gains in productivity: Evidence from firms in the global paper industry

This paper examines the impact of investments in modernization and innovation on productivity in a sample of firms in the global pulp and paper industry. This industry has traditionally accounted for significant amounts of employment and capital investment in North America and Europe. In contrast to much of the existing literature which focuses on the impact of R&D and patents on firms’ performance and productivity, we examine data on actual investment transactions in four main areas: (i) mechanical, (ii) chemicals, (iii) monitoring devices and (iv) information technology. We find that firms that implemented a greater number of investment transactions in modernization achieved higher productivity, and these estimated quantitative effects are greater than the impact of standard innovation variables such as patents and R&D. Investment transactions in the information technology and digital monitoring devices imparted a particularly noticeable boost to productivity. These results are obtained after controlling for other firm-specific variables such as capital intensity or mergers and acquisitions. Thus, firms’ decisions to undertake investments in modernization and incremental innovations appear to be critical for achieving gains in productivity, compounding to form meaningful differences in performance, productivity and competitive position across firms in the longer run. For some of the traditional industries like pulp and paper, R&D and patents seem to be particularly poor indicators of innovation and, more generally, how firms go about achieving gains in productivity.     

Regional economic integration and R&D investment

We analyze the influence of a regional economic integration agreement (REIA) on a firm's investments in research and development (R&D). A country's entry into a REIA creates two competing influences on the firm's R&D investments. On the one hand, increased competition in product markets after the REIA would induce the firm to invest in internal R&D to improve its distinctive technological competitiveness. On the other hand, better access to sources of inputs in factor markets after the REIA would induce the firm to purchase external R&D because it can outsource technology more easily. Surprisingly, the empirical analysis shows that the REIA's impact on R&D investment is driven primarily by product markets rather than by factor markets. After the REIA, product markets induce firms not only to invest more in internal R&D but also purchase more external R&D. In contrast, after the REIA factor markets have limited influence on internal or external R&D investments.     

Organizational and human resource management and innovation: Which management practices are linked to product and/or process innovation?

We examine the determinants of firms’ innovation success, using the firm-level data from the Japanese National Innovation Survey. We focus on the relationship between organizational and human resource management practices for research and development (R&D) and product/process innovation. We find that interdivisional cooperation/teams and the creation/relocation/integration of R&D centers are positively associated with both product and process innovation. Having board members with an R&D background is positively associated with product innovation, implying that top-down R&D decision-making may be important for firms to introduce new products. Among the factors examined, personnel assessment reflecting R&D outcomes appears to have an especially strong relationship with product innovation. Moreover, the positive relationship between the creation/relocation/integration of R&D centers and innovation success suggests that drastic organizational changes can work as a clear signal of firms’ determination to pursue an innovation-oriented strategy and help to accelerate innovation success.     

Factors affecting university-industry R&D projects: The importance of searching, screening and signalling

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the determinants of research cooperation between firms and Public research organisations (PROs) for a sample of innovating small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The econometric analysis is based on the results of the KNOW survey carried out in seven EU countries during 2000. In contrast to earlier works that provide information about the importance of PROs’ research, we know the number of firm/PRO collaborative research and development (R&D) projects. This allows us to study the determinants of firm collaboration with PROs in terms of both the propensity of a firm to undertake R&D projects with a university (do they cooperate or not) and the extent of this collaboration (number of R&D projects). Two questions are addressed. Which firms cooperated with PROs? And what are the firm characteristics that might explain the number of R&D projects with PROs? The results of our analysis point to two major phenomena. First, the propensity to forge an agreement with an academic partner depends on the ‘absolute size’ of the industrial partner. Second the openness of firms to the external environment, as measured by their willingness to search, screen and signal, significantly affects the development of R&D projects with PROs. Our findings suggest that acquiring knowledge through the screening of publications and involvement in public policies positively affects the probability of signing an agreement with a PRO, but not the number of R&D projects developed. In fact, firms that outsource research and development, and patent to protect innovation and to signal competencies show higher levels of collaboration.     

Is a higher rate of R&D tax credit a panacea for low levels of R&D in disadvantaged regions?

This paper studies the impact of R&D spending on output as well as forecasting the impact of a regionally enhanced R&D tax credit on the ‘user cost’ (or price) of R&D expenditure and subsequently the demand for R&D. The example we use of a ‘disadvantaged’ region is Northern Ireland (partly because it has the lowest levels of R&D spending in the UK, and partly because the necessary data is available for this region). We find that in the long run, R&D spending has a mostly positive impact on output across various manufacturing industries. In addition, plants with a zero R&D stock experience significant one-off negative productivity effects. As to the adjustment of R&D in response to changes in the ‘user cost’, our results suggest a rather slow adjustment over time, and a long-run own-price elasticity of around −1.4 for Northern Ireland. We also find that to have a major impact on R&D spending in the Province, the R&D tax credit would need to be increased substantially; this would be expensive in terms of the net exchequer cost.