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on Technology and Industrial Dynamics |
| By: | Antonello Zanfei (Department of Economics, Society & Politics, Università di Urbino "Carlo Bo"); Giovanni Marin (Department of Economics, Society & Politics, Università di Urbino "Carlo Bo") |
| Abstract: | TThis paper evaluates the effect of host-country environmental policy stringency on the offshoring of environmental patents for 2000 top world R&D performers. It is shown that a more stringent environmental regulation triggers both the extensive and intensive margin of patent offshoring in the field of environmental technologies. Results are robust to various different specifications, alternative definitions of innovation offshoring and of regulation restrictions, and to the consideration of possible endogeneity of regulation. It is suggested inter alia that R&D subsidies and non-market based regulatory measures are more important than market-based instruments as drivers of cross-border environmental innovation |
| Keywords: | MNE, environmental policy, patent data |
| JEL: | F10 F23 O33 Q55 |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:urb:wpaper:18_03&r=tid |
| By: | Comin, Diego (Dartmouth College & CEPR); Licht, Georg (ZEW); Pellens, Maikel (ZEW & KU Leuven); Schubert, Torben (CIRCLE & Fraunhofer ISI) |
| Abstract: | Among available policy levers to boost innovation, investment in applied research organisations has received the least attention. In this paper, we analyze the case of the Fraunhofer Society, the largest public applied research organization in Germany. We analyze whether project interaction with Fraunhofer affect the performance and strategic orientation of firms. To that end, we assemble a unique dataset based on the confidential Fraunhofer-internal project management system and merge it with the German contribution to the Community Innovation Survey (CIS), which contains panel information on firm performance. Using instrumental variables that exploit the scale heteroscedasticity of the independent variable (Lewbel, 2012), we identify the causal effects of Fraunhofer interactions on firm performance and strategies. We find a strong, positive effect of project interaction on turnover and productivity growth. We also provide evidence that a major driver of the positive performance effects is the firms increased share of sales from new products and an increase in the share of workers with tertiary education. More detailed analyses reveal, amongst others that the performance effects become stronger the more often firms interact with Fraunhofer and that interactions aiming at generation of technology have a stronger effect than interactions aiming merely at the implementation of existing technologies. |
| Keywords: | Innovation; R&D; diffusion; applied research; Fraunhofer |
| JEL: | O33 O38 |
| Date: | 2018–03–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:lucirc:2018_007&r=tid |
| By: | Thomas von Brasch; Diana-Cristina Iancu; Arvid Raknerud (Statistics Norway) |
| Abstract: | We reconcile two different strands of the literature: the literature on how new goods impact prices and the literature on productivity growth and firm turnover. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to provide a fully consistent decomposition of aggregate productivity growth that identifies the contribution from new firms producing new varieties. We extend the estimator for the demand elasticity, proposed by Feenstra (1994) and supplemented by Soderbery (2015), in two dimensions: First, we create a two-stage estimation framework that exploits the boundary cases where simultaneity is not an issue, i.e. when supply is elastic or inelastic, to obtain a more efficient estimator. Second, we make it robust towards choice of reference unit. To illustrate the decomposition and estimator, we analyse the case of firm turnover in Norway, using panel data covering the period from 1995 to 2016 for manufacturing firms. Our results indicate that net creation of new varieties from firm turnover contributes by about one half percentage point to annual aggregate productivity growth. |
| Keywords: | Aggregation; Productivity growth; Variety gains; Demand elasticity |
| JEL: | C43 E24 O47 |
| Date: | 2018–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ssb:dispap:872&r=tid |
| By: | Teodora Marinova (Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration) |
| Abstract: | The traditional new product development (NPD) process is vertically integrated within a company, resulting in internally developed products by professionals. However, it encounters difficulties to optimally capture all innovation-relevant knowledge, which is distributed also among external actors such as product end users. This paper investigates if the theoretically proposed positive effect of integrating users in NPD on new product success is supported by evidence from the field. The aim is to summarize existing field insights in a conceptual model outlining the paths of influence of user integration in NPD on subsequent new product performance. By reviewing the findings of empirical studies based exclusively on real-field data from various industries, I identify factors that can be assigned to three groups: (i) Stage of the NPD process in which users are integrated, (ii) User-level factors, and (iii) Innovation setting factors. I map the relationships between the different factors in a holistic framework that can serve as guidance for practitioners who consider involving users in their innovation process. |
| Keywords: | User innovation, user integration, new product development, new product success. |
| JEL: | M3 O31 O32 O33 |
| Date: | 2018–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sko:wpaper:bep-2018-02&r=tid |
| By: | Giebel, Marek; Kraft, Kornelius |
| Abstract: | We analyze the causal effect of the credit supply shock to banks induced by interbank market disruptions in the recent financial crisis 2008/2009 on their business customers' innovation activity. Using a matched bank-firm data set for Germany, we find that having relations with a more severely affected bank seriously hampers firms' current innovation activities due to funding shortages. Furthermore, we find that firms with a relationship to a less severely affected bank are more likely to initiate new product and process innovations and to reallocate human resources to innovation during the financial crisis. |
| Keywords: | financing of innovations,credit supply,financial crisis,innovative activities |
| JEL: | G01 G21 G30 O16 O30 O31 |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:zewdip:18011&r=tid |
| By: | Sangmin Aum; Sang Yoon (Tim) Lee; Yongseok Shin |
| Abstract: | Aggregate productivity growth in the U.S. has slowed down since the 2000s. We quantify the importance of differential productivity growth across occupations and across industries, and the rise of computers since the 1980s, for the productivity slowdown. Complementarity across occupations and industries in production shrinks the relative size of those with high productivity growth, reducing their contributions toward aggregate productivity growth, resulting in its slowdown. We find that such a force, especially the shrinkage of occupations with above-average productivity growth through “routinization,” was present since the 1980s. Through the end of the 1990s, this force was countervailed by the extraordinarily high productivity growth in the computer industry, of which output became an increasingly more important input in all industries (“computerization”). It was only when the computer industry's productivity growth slowed down in the 2000s that the negative effect of routinization on aggregate productivity became apparent. We also show that the decline in the labor income share can be attributed to computerization, which substitutes labor across all industries. |
| JEL: | E01 E22 E25 O41 O47 |
| Date: | 2018–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24357&r=tid |
| By: | Carsten Fink; Bronwyn H. Hall; Christian Helmers |
| Abstract: | We analyze the use of intellectual property (IP) by firms in Chile over the decade 1995-2005 as the then middle-income country experienced rapid economic growth of 4.7 percent per year. We use a novel dataset that contains a combination of detailed firm-level information from the annual manufacturing census, information on firms’ innovative activities from Chile’s innovation surveys, and firms’ patent, industrial design, and trademark filings with the Chilean IP office. We use these data to look at how IP use by companies has changed over time and analyze the determinants of IP use, in particular first-time use. We find that sales growth prompts first-time use of patents and trademarks, though such use does not change the growth trajectory of firms nor does it improve their total factor productivity. We also find that trademark use is associated with new-to-the-world product innovation, which suggests that branding may be an important mechanism to appropriate returns to innovation in a middle-income country like Chile. |
| JEL: | O12 O34 |
| Date: | 2018–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24348&r=tid |
| By: | Armanda Cetrulo; Valeria Cirillo; Dario Guarascio |
| Abstract: | In the last decades, labour flexibility has been introduced all across Europe with the aim of spurring jobs and productivity. This work explores the link between the use of temporary employment and the propensity to introduce product innovations by firms. The analysis performed at the sectoral level combines information on innovation, economic performance and employment for five major European economies observed over the period 1998-2012. Taking into account the variety of technological patterns, the authors find that industries using temporary employment more intensively are characterized by a weak product innovation propensity. The negative correlation between temporary employment and innovation is stronger in medium and high-tech sectors identified alternatively by Peneder classification and by the concentration of firms’ intangible assets proxing different Schumpeterian regimes of accumulation. |
| Date: | 2018–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ast:wpaper:0032&r=tid |
| By: | Grafström, Jonas (The Ratio Institute) |
| Abstract: | The objective of this paper is to investigate the presence of convergence (or divergence) of invention efforts per capita in the renewable energy field across European Union (EU) countries. Divergence may imply a risk of a lower level of goal fulfilment regarding the share of renewable energy in the EU energy mix. This is due to free-rider issues and sub-optimal investment levels, in turn making it more expensive and cumbersome to expand renewable energy production. Convergence suggests a possible faster renewable energy goal achievement. The econometric analysis is based on patent application counts per capita for 13 EU Member States over the time period 1990–2012. The methods used draw on the economic convergence literature. First, we rely on a panel data set to test for conditional β-convergence. Moreover, a distributional dynamics approach is employed to test for σ- and γ-convergence, and analyse the intra-distributional dynamics. The results indicate conditional β- and σ-divergence in renewable energy invention capabilities across the 13 countries, thus suggesting that some EU countries tend to free-ride on the development efforts of other Member States. |
| Keywords: | convergence; divergence; renewable energy development; patent counts; EU |
| JEL: | O30 O40 O44 |
| Date: | 2017–12–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:ratioi:0295&r=tid |
| By: | Chen, Yang (Division of Economics, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University); Luan, Fushu (Division of Economics, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University); Regis, Paulo José (Division of Economics, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University) |
| Abstract: | We contribute to explore the roles of sub-national leaders and institutional environment in shaping urban innovation in China. We adopt a dynamic production function framework using a panel dataset comprising 280 prefecture cities during 2001-2014. We find that knowledge and education boost local innovative outputs and has positive spillover effects; the externalities of domestic and foreign capital are limited to local investments. Controlling for the basic production inputs, our analysis unveils a clear and significant role of meritocracy with regional dimension in sharpening the competitive advantage of city innovativeness measured by patents applications. Party secretary competition intensity and tenure encourages innovation while city mayor turnover rate has a negative effect. Marketization intensity also positively links with urban innovation. Compared with diversity and specialization, competitive industrial structures bring more creative elements into regional knowledge and idea production. |
| Keywords: | Innovation, Meritocracy, Institutions, Prefecture-Level City, China |
| JEL: | H11 R11 O30 P26 C33 |
| Date: | 2018–02–20 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:xjt:rieiwp:2018-03&r=tid |
| By: | Joshua S. Graff Zivin; Elizabeth Lyons |
| Abstract: | Existing theories and empirical research on how innovation occurs largely assume that innovativeness is an inherent characteristic of the individual and that people with this innate ability select into jobs that require it. In this paper, we investigate whether people who do not self-select into being innovators can be induced to innovate, and whether they innovate differently than those who do self-select into innovating. To test these questions, we designed and implemented an innovation contest for engineering and computer science students which allowed us to differentiate between those who self-select into innovative activities and those who are willing to undertake them only after receiving an additional incentive for doing so. We also randomly offer encouragement to subsets of both the induced and self-selected contest participants in order to examine the importance of confidence-building interventions on each sample. We find that while induced participants have different observable characteristics than those that were ‘innately’ drawn to the competition, on average, the success of induced participants was statistically indistinguishable from their self-selected counterparts and encouragement does not change this result. Heterogeneity in treatment effects suggests an important role for the use of targeted interventions. |
| JEL: | J24 M54 O32 |
| Date: | 2018–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24339&r=tid |
| By: | Johannes van der Pol |
| Abstract: | The aim of this paper is to show how firm-level partner selection strategies impact the structure a of collaboration network. The analysis is performed in three stages. A first stage identifies how partners select their collaborators, a second stage shows how these decisions result in clusters, and a final stage studies the global network structure that emerges from the interconnection of these clusters. In order to highlight the importance of the sectors’ influence, the analysis is performed on the French Aerospace and the French Biotech collaboration networks. Results show that the firm-level strategies are the same in both sectors while the resulting global network structure is different (core-periphery structure with small-world characteristics for the aerospace network and no particular structure for the biotech sector). The difference in the global network structure can be explained by sectorial characteristics. These differences define the manner in which knowledge flows through the network. |
| Keywords: | SNA; Sectoral analysis; Collaboration network; Biotechnology; Aerospace; ERGM; Innovation |
| JEL: | L25 C23 D85 L14 C20 |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:grt:wpegrt:2018-02&r=tid |