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on Technology and Industrial Dynamics |
| By: | Bakker, Gerben (London School of Economics); Crafts, Nicholas (University of Warwick); Woltjer, Pieter (Wageningen University) |
| Abstract: | We develop new aggregate and sectoral Total Factor Productivity (TFP) estimates for the United States between 1899 and 1941 through better coverage of sectors and better measured labor quality, and show TFP-growth was lower than previously thought, broadly based across sectors, strongly variant intertemporally, and consistent with many diverse sources of innovation. We then test and reject three prominent claims. First, the 1930s did not have the highest TFP-growth of the twentieth century. Second, TFP-growth was not predominantly caused by four leading sectors. Third, TFP-growth was not caused by a ‘yeast process’ originating in a dominant technology such as electricity. |
| Keywords: | Harberger diagram; mushrooms; productivity growth; total factor productivity; yeast JEL Classification: N11, N12, O47, O51 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cge:wacage:257&r=tid |
| 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=tid |
| 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=tid |
| By: | Yatang Lin; Yu Qin; Zhuan Zie |
| Abstract: | How does the transfer of advanced technology spur innovation in developing countries? This paper exploits the large-scale introduction of high-speed railway (HSR) technology into China in 2004 as a natural experiment to address this question. The experiment is unique in the sense that this wave of technology transfer is large, abrupt and arguably exogenous in timing, covering a variety of technology classes and a large number of geographically-dispersed railway-related firms. With detailed information on the types of technology transferred and the identities of the receiving firms, as well as their product market specializations, we are able to depict a clear picture of how foreign technology is digested and spurs follow-up innovation in and out of directly receiving firms. Our findings suggest that technology transfer leads to significant growth in HSR-related patents in cities with direct receivers of imported technology after 2004 in a triple-difference estimation. We also observe sizable spillovers to firms that are not directly related to the railway industry. Technology similarity plays an important role in technology diffusion, but we do not observe any significant impacts of geographic proximity. Previous university research strength in relevant fields is also conducive to stronger technology spillovers. |
| Keywords: | innovation, foreign technology transfer, knowledge spillover, China |
| JEL: | O25 O33 O38 |
| Date: | 2015–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1393&r=tid |
| By: | O.A. Carboni; G. Medda |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the role of research activity and other micro determinants, on firms' investment behaviour. The empirical analysis is based on a large representative and cross-country comparative sample of manufacturing firms across seven European countries. Given the potential simultaneity between investment decision and R&D spending, we used an instrumental variable procedure to overcome the problem of endogeneity and an instrument was constructed to cope with this issue. We find that R&D positively affects investment decisions. The analysis highlights the importance of financial factors, particularly with respect to firms’ internal resources, and also sensible cross-country effects, in determining the investment level. |
| Keywords: | r&d, investment, firm behavior, IV model |
| JEL: | C31 O32 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cns:cnscwp:201515&r=tid |
| 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=tid |
| 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=tid |