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on Technology and Industrial Dynamics |
| By: | Audretsch, David (Indiana University); Kuratko, Donald (Indiana University); Link, Albert (University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Department of Economics) |
| Abstract: | This paper seeks to distinguish between dynamic and static entrepreneurship. We define the construct of dynamic entrepreneurship in terms of Schumpeterian innovativeness and then develop a hypothesis suggesting that human capital is conducive to such action. In contrast, a paucity of human capital is more conducive to static entrepreneurship (defined in terms of organizational or ownership status). Based on a rich data set of entrepreneurs receiving research funding through the U.S. Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, our empirical evidence suggests that academic-based human capital is positively correlated with dynamic behavior, whereas as business-based human capital and prior business experience is not. |
| Keywords: | Dynamic entrepreneurship; Static entrepreneurship; Schumpeterian innovation; human capital; Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program |
| JEL: | J24 L26 O38 |
| Date: | 2016–04–14 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:uncgec:2016_002&r=tid |
| By: | Reinhilde Veugelers |
| Abstract: | Highlights There is a significant divide between the European Union countries with the greatest capacity to innovate, and those with the least capacity to innovate. The difficult convergence process has been proceeding only very slowly and unevenly, and more recently seems to have come to a halt. For footnotes and references, see the PDF version of this paper. A particular weak spot for the EU is corporate investment in research; in this area, the intra-EU divide is growing. As the business sector is responsible for the persistent R&D intensity gap between the EU and the United States and Asia, the persistent failure of lagging EU countries to catch up in this area provides much of the explanation for the EU’s weak performance compared to other economies. The evidence shows that the deployment of public budgets and the mix of policies employed by EU member states have tended to aggravate the intra-EU divide. The EU needs to better understand its growing internal innovation divide if it is to achieve its ambition of becoming a world innovation leader. 1. Introduction The European Union’s lofty ambition is that its growth should be socially and environmentally sustainable and its future prosperity should be built on foundations of innovation. But ambition has so far not translated into leading performance. According to the European Commission’s 2015 Innovation Union Scoreboard indicator (IUS), a composite indicator developed to assess innovation performance, Europe is not doing well. The EU’s IUS score is only 81 percent of that of the United States. For the moment, Europe still has a substantial lead over emerging markets. But China, with an IUS score still half of the EU's, is catching up fast. On private expenditure on research and development, a key indicator to assess a nation’s capacity for innovation, the EU is lagging significantly. Its private R&D-to-GDP ratio is 57 percent of the US level. In terms of public expenditure on R&D, there is no gap between the EU and the US. But Europe’s overall R&D-to-GDP-ratio continues to stand at 2 percent, far from the EU's 3 percent target and significantly lower than the US, Japan, South Korea and Singapore. China has caught up fast and in terms of overall R&D spending is already on par with the EU. This Policy Contribution examines the EU’s struggle to improve its capacity for innovation, in particular the differences between EU member states in terms of their capacity to innovate. Is the EU’s failure to catch up a failure of its innovation-leading member states to defend and further improve their leading positions? Or is it because its innovation-lagging member states fail to catch up and the EU has not closed the innovation divide between its member countries? We show a serious divide between EU member states in terms of their capacity to innovate, with convergence taking place only very slowly and unevenly. More recently, the already-difficult convergence process seems to have come to a halt. In terms of the innovation policies used by member states, the evidence shows that the deployment of public budgets and the mix of instruments might have aggravated the divide. 2. The innovation capacity of EU member states - a growing divide The innovation capacity of nations measures their ability to generate new ideas and to translate them into economic growth and prosperity (Furman et al, 2002). Because of differences in initial conditions and because of differences in how EU countries have sought to create innovation-based growth, we can expect substantial differences between European countries in terms of innovation capacity. We would however expect that the process of EU integration would allow lagging countries to catch up faster, pushing convergence within the EU in terms of innovation capacity, along with economic convergence. In order to assess countries’ innovation capacities, a range of factors needs to be explored. In addition to the availability of R&D inputs, public R&D infrastructure and financing, this includes the linking of public and private bodies involved in innovation, incentives for firms to innovate, and the ability of firms to create and capture value from their innovations on world markets (Furman et al, 2002). To measure innovation capacity, we use the Summary Innovation Index from the IUS. This covers eight aspects of innovation capacity - human resources, public research systems, finance, investment by firms, linkages, intellectual property rights, innovations and economic effects1. We measure the variation in innovation capacity across the EU countries. Convergence occurs when the variation decreases over time. The divide in innovation capacity measures the gap between the best and worst performers within a group of countries2. When looking within the EU at differences in IUS performance (Table 1), the countries at the top are Denmark, Finland, Germany and Sweden, while Bulgaria, Latvia and Romania sit at the bottom. |
| Date: | 2016–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bre:polcon:13667&r=tid |
| By: | Lorenzo Caliendo; Giordano Mion; Luca David Opromolla; Esteban Rossi-Hansberg |
| Abstract: | The productivity of firms is, at least partly, determined by a firm's actions and decisions. One of these decisions involves the organization of production in terms of the number of layers of management the firm decides to employ. Using detailed employer-employee matched data and firm production quantity and input data for Portuguese firms, we study the endogenous response of revenue-based and quantity based productivity to a change in layers: a firm reorganization. We show that as a result of an exogenous demand or productivity shock that makes the firm reorganize and add a management layer, quantity based productivity increases by about 4%, while revenue-based productivity drops by more than 4%. Such a reorganization makes the firm more productive, but also increases the quantity produced to an extent that lowers the price charged by the firm and, as a result, its revenue-based productivity. |
| Keywords: | Productivity; organization; wages; managers; layers; TFP; firm size |
| JEL: | J1 |
| Date: | 2015–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:66062&r=tid |
| By: | Schain, Jan Philip; Stiebale, Joel |
| Abstract: | We analyze the relationship between institutional investors, innovation and financing constraints. Building on the empirical framework of Aghion et al. (2013), we find that the effect of institutional ownership on innovation is concentrated in industries with high dependence on external finance and among firms which are a priori likely to be financially constrained. The complementarity between institutional ownership and competition, predicted by the original paper's theory where institutional investors increase innovation through reducing career risks, disappears once this heterogeneity is taken into account. We also provide evidence that the sensitivity of R&D investment to internal funds decreases with institutional ownership. |
| JEL: | G23 G32 L25 M10 O31 O34 |
| Date: | 2016 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:dicedp:219&r=tid |
| By: | Matt Hopkins (The Academic-Industry Research Network.); William Lazonick (University of Massachusetts Lowell and The Academic-Industry Research Network.) |
| Abstract: | A nation must accumulate a high-tech knowledge base to prosper. In this paper, we provide a historical perspective on the interaction of household families, government agencies, and business enterprises, or what we call “the investment triad†, in providing a foundation for the accumulation of a high-tech knowledge base in the United States. Households and governments interact by making investments in education. Governments and businesses interact in the development of the high-tech knowledge base by investing in research and development. Businesses and households interact to invest in the knowledge base through the employment relation. The quality of these interactions in terms of complementarity and sophistication are of critical importance to the productivity performance of investments in the knowledge base. Most discussions of investing in the high-tech knowledge base focus on investments made in R&D by government and business as well as universities and non-profits. We argue that investment in R&D does not capture the productivity of R&D in generating high-quality, low cost high-tech products, nor how the revenues from those products support the higher incomes of the broad base of employees in the high-tech labor force. Over the past decade total R&D spending as a percent of GDP in the United States has remained high by historical standards, with Business-funded R&D exceeding the proportion of Government-funded R&D in the total. Yet there is a sense in the United States that over the past two to three decades the institutional arrangements for investing in the knowledge base have broken down. We hypothesize that the innovation problem resides in the interaction of the organizations – household families, government agencies, and business enterprises – in the investment triad. Using the investment-triad framework, this report provides an historical overview of the evolution of the institutional arrangements for investing in the knowledge base in the United States since the mid-19th century, culminating in an agenda for research on the contemporary operation and performance of the investment triad. |
| JEL: | H1 I2 L2 O3 P1 |
| Date: | 2014–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:thk:wpaper:14&r=tid |
| By: | Klaus S. Friesenbichler (WIFO); Michael Peneder (WIFO) |
| Abstract: | We investigate the drivers of firm level productivity in catching-up economies by jointly estimating its relationship to innovation and competition using data from the EBRD-WB Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The findings confirm an inverted-U shaped impact of competition on R&D. Both competition and innovation have a simultaneous positive effect on labour productivity in terms of either sales or value added per employee, as does a high share of university graduates and foreign ownership. Further positive impacts come from firm size, exports, or population density. Innovation and foreign ownership appear to be the strongest drivers of multifactor productivity. |
| Keywords: | innovation, competition, productivity, development, transition economies, simultaneous system |
| Date: | 2016–04–13 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wfo:wpaper:y:2016:i:516&r=tid |
| By: | Fujii, Daisuke; Nakajima, Kentaro; Saito, Yukiko Umeno |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the relationships between determinants of industrial coagglomeration and establishment-level productivity. For each pair of industries, we first construct degree of coagglomeration and indices for three factors of coagglomeration: inter-firm transactions, knowledge spillover, and labor market pooling. We then examine correlation between these three factors and degree of coagglomeration. Overall, inter-firm transactions and labor market pooling are positively correlated with the degree of coagglomeration whereas knowledge spillover has no significant relationship with coagglomeration. We also find that determinants of coagglomeration are quite different across industries. Further, we examine relationships between these factors and establishment-level productivity. In the results, we find that determinants of coagglomeration are not necessarily positively associated with productivity of establishments. |
| Keywords: | coagglomeration, transaction costs, knowledge spillover, labor pooling |
| JEL: | R11 |
| Date: | 2016–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hit:remfce:57&r=tid |
| By: | Colombelli, Alessandra; Krafft, Jackie; Vivarelli, Marco (University of Turin) |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the reasons why entry per se is not necessarily good and the evidence showing that innovative startups survive longer than their non-innovative counterparts. In this framework, our own empirical analysis shows that greater survival is achieved when startups engage successfully in both product innovation and process innovation, with a key role of the latter. Moreover, this study goes beyond a purely microeconomic perspective and discusses the key role of the environment within which innovative entries occur. What shown and discussed in this contribution strongly supports the proposal that the creation and survival of innovative start-ups should become one qualifying point of the economic policy agenda. |
| Date: | 2016–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:uto:labeco:201601&r=tid |
| By: | Massimiliano Mazzanti; Davide Antonioli; Claudia Ghisetti; Francesco Nicolli |
| Abstract: | This report provides a review of recent firm-level and plant-level surveys containing questions on environmental policies, innovation practices or performance which are relevant for environmental policy analysis and assessment. We specifically focus on the core element that relates environmental policies to environmental and economic performance, namely the adoption of innovative practices and environmental innovations by firms. The study gives an overview of the main literature exploiting surveys, with the aim of discussing main themes and their core limitations to propose advancements for future research. The report provides technical details on surveyed questionnaire implementation, by focusing on to the intrinsic trade-off in the design of alternative questions. It also discusses how environmental policy and its stringency have been measured in previous literature. Finally, it provides suggestions on how to implement a multi-country survey and on other ways to better harness firm-level data in the analysis of effects of environmental policies on business behaviour. |
| Keywords: | innovation, environmental innovation, firm surveys, firm behaviour, environmental policies |
| JEL: | C8 D22 Q52 Q55 Q58 |
| Date: | 2016–04–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:oec:envaaa:103-en&r=tid |
| By: | Irem Guceri (Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation); Li Liu (Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation) |
| Abstract: | With growing academic and policy interest in R&D tax incentives, the question about their effectiveness has become ever more relevant. In the absence of an exogenous policy reform, the simultaneous determination of companies' tax positions and their R&D spending causes an identification problem in evaluating tax incentives. To overcome this problem, we exploit a UK policy reform and use the population of corporation tax records that provide precise information on the amount of firm-level R&D expenditure. Using difference-in-differences and other panel regression approaches, we find a positive and significant impact of tax incentives on R&D spending, and an implied user cost elasticity estimate of around -2.3. This translates to more than a pound in additional private R&D for each pound foregone in corporation tax revenue. |
| Keywords: | Tax incentives; corporation tax returns; quasi-experiment |
| JEL: | H2 O3 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:btx:wpaper:1512&r=tid |