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on Small Business Management |
| By: | Hottenrott, Hanna; Lopes-Bento, Cindy |
| Abstract: | R&D collaboration facilitates pooling of complementary skills, learning from the partner as well as sharing risks and costs. Research therefore repeatedly stressed the positive relationship between collaborative R&D and innovation performance. Fewer studies addressed potential drawbacks of collaborative R&D. Collaborative R&D comes at the costs of coordination and monitoring, requires knowledge disclosure and involves the risk of opportunistic behaviour by the partners. Thus, while the net gains from collaboration can be high initially, cost may start to outweigh those benefits if firms engage in multiple collaborative projects simultaneously. This study explicitly considers a firm's collaboration intensity, that is, the share of collaborative R&D projects in the firms' total R&D project portfolio. For a sample of 2,891 firms located in Germany, active in abroad range of manufacturing and service sectors and of which 86% are SMEs, we indeed find that increasing the share of collaborative R&D projects in total R&D projects is associated with a higher probability of product innovation and with a higher market success of new products. While we can confirm previous findings in terms of gains for innovation performance, we also find that collaboration has decreasing and even negative returns on product innovation if its intensity increases above a certain threshold. Consequently, the relationship between collaboration intensity and innovation has an inverted-U shape. In particular, costs start outweighing benefits if a firm pursues more than about two thirds of its R&D projects in collaboration. This result is robust to conditioning market success to the introduction of new products and to accounting for the selection into collaborating. |
| Keywords: | innovation performance,product innovation,R&D partnerships,collaboration intensity,financing constraints,collaboration complexity,transaction costs,selection model,endogenous switching |
| JEL: | O31 O32 O33 O34 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:zewdip:14108r&r=sbm |
| By: | Bournakis, Ioannis; Vecchi, Michela; Venturini, Francesco |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates whether off-shoring promotes technological specialization by reallocating resources towards high-tech industries and/or stimulating within industry R&D. Using data for the US, Japan and Europe, our results show that material off-shoring promotes high-tech specialization through input reallocation between sectors, while service off-shoring favours technologically advanced production by increasing within-industry productivity, mainly via its positive impact on R&D. Conversely, we find that the increasing fragmentation of core production tasks, captured by narrow off-shoring, has adverse effects on technological specialisation, which suggests that this type of off-shoring is mainly pursued for cost-reduction motives. |
| Keywords: | High-tech specialization, off-shoring, productivity, R&D, OECD industries |
| JEL: | F14 L16 O30 |
| Date: | 2015–12–15 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:68382&r=sbm |
| By: | Sara Amoroso (European Commission – JRC - IPTS) |
| Abstract: | A basic assumption in the economic literature is the one of diminishing marginal returns to labour. However, theoretical studies on knowledge and labour specialization assume that an increase in the knowledge investment embodied in the human capital of workers raises the marginal product of labour. In this paper, we propose a structural approach to test the hypothesis of non-diminishing returns to labour for a panel data set of R&D investing companies, and we explore how the marginal returns to labour vary with their level of knowledge capital (R&D) intensity. Our econometric analysis provides a number of results. First, we find that more knowledge intensive firms have non-diminishing returns to labour, while less knowledge intensive companies exhibit diminishing returns. Second, independently from the knowledge capital intensity, returns to labour increase with size. Relatively smaller firms have diminishing returns, while larger companies have non-diminishing to increasing returns to labour. However, we show that more knowledge intensive firms can attain the threshold of non-diminishing returns faster than their counterparts. |
| Keywords: | size, specialization, profitability, profit function |
| JEL: | J24 L10 L25 O30 |
| Date: | 2015–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ipt:wpaper:201510&r=sbm |
| By: | Offick, Sven; Winkler, Roland C. |
| Abstract: | A recent theoretical literature highlights the role of endogenous firm entry as an internal amplification mechanism of business cycle fluctuations. The amplification mechanism works through the competition and the variety effect. This paper tests the significance of this amplification mechanism, quantifies its importance, and disentangles the competition and the variety effect. To this end, we estimate a medium-scale real business cycle model with firm entry for the U.S. economy. The competition and the variety effect are estimated to be statistically significant. Together, they amplify the volatility of output by 8.5 percent relative to a model in which both effects are switched off. The competition effect accounts for most amplification, whereas the variety effect only plays a minor role. |
| Keywords: | Bayesian estimation,Business Cycles,Competition Effect,Entry,Mark-ups,Variety Effect |
| JEL: | E20 E32 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:cauewp:201506&r=sbm |
| By: | Yaya KOLOMA (École Supérieure d’Agro-développement International : ISTOM); Zaka RATSIMALAHELO (Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté, CRESE) |
| Abstract: | This paper focuses on the link between young people's access to microcredit and performance of their business by asking whether the performance of their microenterprise can be explained by access or lack of access to microcredit. Using the survey data conducted by INSTAT and ODHD Mali among the recipients of microfinance services in 2007-2008, we, firstly, give a descriptive approach to analyze micro financing conditions and performance indicators. The propensity score matching is then used to estimate both the determinants of access to credit and the effects of access on the performance of micro-enterprises. |
| Keywords: | Young people, Microcredit, Microenterprises, Efficiency, Mali |
| JEL: | I3 J16 C2 G21 |
| Date: | 2015–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crb:wpaper:2015-15&r=sbm |
| By: | Carlino, Gerald (Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia); Kerr, William R. (Harvard University, Bank of Finland, and NBER) |
| Abstract: | This paper reviews academic research on the connections between agglomeration and innovation. We first describe the conceptual distinctions between invention and innovation. We then discuss how these factors are frequently measured in the data and note some resulting empirical regularities. Innovative activity tends to be more concentrated than industrial activity, and we discuss important findings from the literature about why this is so. We highlight the traits of cities (e.g., size, industrial diversity) that theoretical and empirical work link to innovation, and we discuss factors that help sustain these features (e.g., the localization of entrepreneurial finance). |
| Keywords: | agglomeration; clusters; innovation; invention; entrepreneurship |
| JEL: | J20 J60 L10 L20 L60 O30 R10 R30 |
| Date: | 2015–12–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:bofrdp:2015_027&r=sbm |