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on Technology and Industrial Dynamics |
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Issue of 2014‒03‒01
five papers chosen by Fulvio Castellacci Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) |
| By: | Nicholas Bloom; Erik Brynjolfsson; Lucia Foster; Ron Jarmin; Megha Patnaik; Itay Saporta-Eksten; John Van Reenen |
| Abstract: | The Census Bureau recently conducted a survey of management practices in over 30,000 plants across the US, the first large-scale survey of management in America. Analyzing these data reveals several striking results. First, more structured management practices are tightly linked to higher levels of IT intensity in terms of a higher expenditure on IT and more on-line sales. Likewise, more structured management is strongly linked with superior performance: establishments adopting more structured practices for performance monitoring, target setting and incentives enjoy greater productivity and profitability, higher rates of innovation and faster employment growth. Second, there is a substantial dispersion of management practices across the establishments. We find that 18% of establishments have adopted at least 75% of these more structured management practices, while 27% of establishments adopted less than 50% of these. Third, more structured management practices are more likely to be found in establishments that export, who are larger (or are part of bigger firms), and have more educated employees. Establishments in the South and Midwest have more structured practices on average than those in the Northeast and West. Finally, we find adoption of structured management practices has increased between 2005 and 2010 for surviving establishments, particularly for those practices involving data collection and analysis. |
| Keywords: | IT, Management, Productivity, Organization |
| JEL: | M1 |
| Date: | 2014–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1258&r=tid |
| By: | Georg Licht; Bettina Peters |
| Abstract: | This paper studies the impact of environmental innovation on employment growth in the period 2006-2008 using firm-level data for German manufacturing and services. It extends the model by Harrison et al (2008) in order to distinguish between employment effects of environmental and non-environmental product as well as process innovation. As a robustness check patent data on green technologies are employed. The results demonstrate that both environmental and non-environmental product innovations stimulate employment growth. We find a similar gross employment effect of both types of product innovations. That is, one-percent increases in sales stemming from new environmental and non-environmental products increase gross employment by one percent each. Thus, we do not find evidence that that new products with environmental benefits for consumers are produced with higher or lower efficiency than old products. Yet, the net employment contribution of non-green product innovations is 4 to 5 times larger than the net contribution of green product innovations. This is the result of differences in the average innovation engagement and innovation success of both types of new products. In contrast, environmental and non-environmental process innovation plays only a little role for employment growth. In particular, we do not identify a significant trade-off between more environmental-friendly production technologies and employment growth. This holds for both cleaner production technologies and end-of pipe technologies. |
| Keywords: | Employment growth, environmental innovation, green patents |
| JEL: | O33 J23 L80 C21 C23 |
| Date: | 2014–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:feu:wfewop:y:2014:m:2:d:0:i:53&r=tid |
| By: | Rasi Kunapatarawong; Ester Martinez Ros |
| Abstract: | This paper reports research on the relationship between sourcing strategy of a firm and its environmental innovation propensity. The data is taken from the Spanish TechnologicalInnovation Panel (PITEC) survey during the period of 2007-2011. The uniqueness of the Spanish innovation structure and the increasing relevance of environmental issues for the Spanish economy make it a proper setting to investigate environmental innovation dynamics. The results from 5,352 firms indicate that large firms are more likely to undertake environmental innovation than small- and medium-sized firms (SMEs). These firms rely quite equally on all four sources of knowledge &- internal, market, institutional and freely-available sources &- when deciding to develop environmental innovation. The broad horizons with respect to knowledge sources are likely to increase firms' propensity to introduce environmental innovation. In addition, weprovide the evolutionary nature of firm's innovation search as firms grow in size. Small firmsrely on both internal and freely-available sources rather equally, while internal source is the most relevant for medium firms, and market is the most important source used by large firms indriving environmental innovation. Particularly important is how firms who are already innovators and who receive local funding from the Spanish government are more likely to introduce environmental innovation. |
| Keywords: | Environmental innovation , Knowledge sourcing , Discrete choice model |
| Date: | 2014–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cte:wbrepe:wb140301&r=tid |
| By: | Sandro Montresor (University of Bologna); Antonio Vezzani (JRC-IPTS) |
| Abstract: | The paper investigates the extent to which outward FDI affect the MNC's capacity of entering (and remaining in) the club of top R&D world investors, benefiting from performance gains in both financial and economic markets. By merging the European Industrial Research and Innovation Scoreboard with the fDi Markets dataset, we find supporting evidence. Increasing the number of FDI projects helps firms overcome the discontinuities that, in the distribution of R&D expenditures, separate the group of the largest world R&D investors from the top of them. The same is true for the number of FDI projects in R&D, which are also more important than greater FDI portfolios in becoming a top R&D spender. Furthermore, unlike FDI in general, more FDI in R&D guarantee firms to remain in this top club of firms as it increases their capacity of resisting competition for a place among the top R&D spenders. Results at the extensive margin (i.e. the number of FDI projects) are confirmed with respect to the scale of FDI projects (i.e. at the intensive margin). However, increasing their size is not enough to become one of the highest ranking R&D firms. Policy implications about the support to R&D internationalisation are drawn accordingly. |
| Keywords: | Foreign Direct Investments (FDI), Multinational Corporations (MNC), Research & Development (R&D). |
| JEL: | O32 F23 O33 |
| Date: | 2014 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ipt:wpaper:201401&r=tid |
| By: | L. Lambertini; R. Orsini |
| Abstract: | We investigate the optimal R&D portfolio of a single-product monopolist investing in cost-reducing activities accompanied by efforts improving the quality of its product. There emerges that the firm’s relative incentives along the two directions are conditional upon market affluency, measured by consumers’ willingness to pay for quality, and R&D efforts are complements at equilibrium. We also perform the stability analysis, showing that a stable branch exists along the quality dimension only. |
| JEL: | L12 O31 |
| Date: | 2014–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bol:bodewp:wp926&r=tid |