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on Technology and Industrial Dynamics |
| By: | Daniel Sichel; Eric von Hippel |
| Abstract: | Household R&D (or household innovation) is an important source of innovation that has to date been largely overlooked in research related to national accounts. Indeed, it is not currently counted as investment in the literatures on household production and human capital. This paper develops time series estimates of nominal investment, real investment, and real capital stocks for household R&D for product innovations in the United States. (We focus on product innovations because survey data on services innovations in the household sector are not yet available.) In the U.S., we find that household product R&D is significant. Our estimate of real investment in 2017 is $41 billion (2012 dollars). This is about half of what producers spend in R&D to develop new products for consumers – a sizable fraction. Our estimate of the real capital stock of household product R&D in 2017 is $233 billion. We conclude that household R&D is an important feature of household activity and, more generally, of the overall landscape of innovation. |
| JEL: | E01 E21 E22 E24 J24 O3 O31 O33 O34 |
| Date: | 2019–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:25599&r=all |
| By: | Andrea Coveri (Department of Economics, Society & Politics, Università di Urbino Carlo Bo); Mario Pianta (Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence) |
| Abstract: | In the last four decades, an increasingly skewed income distribution has favored capital at the expense of labour and has been coupled with ever growing inequalities. Merging a Neo-Schumpeterian approach to innovation with a Post-Keynesian theoretical framework, this work contributes to the analysis of the structural determinants of functional income distribution. Building on Pianta and Tancioni (2008), we propose a simultaneous model on wage and profit dynamics identifying technological change, offshoring strategies and role of trade unions as key factors which shape the power relations between capital and labour. On the empirical ground, we perform an industry-level analysis extending and improving the Sectoral Innovation Database (SID), which accounts for 38 manufacturing and service sectors for six major European countries (France, Germany, Italy,Netherlands, Spain and United Kindgom) from 1994 to 2014. We find that, despite the structural asymmetries between industries’ patterns of evolution, labour productivity growth and product innovation have a positive impact on both distributive components, while a rather negative effect of process innovation on wages is detected. Offshoring processes generally emerge as profit-enhancing while represent a reliable firms’ weapon to reduce labour costs, although a remarkable heterogeneity arises when the technological nature of offshoring strategies is accounted for; finally, union density tends to be positively associated with wage dynamics, suggesting the relevance of labour market institutions in conditioning the patterns of income distribution. |
| Keywords: | Distribution, innovation, offshoring, union density, Europe, industries. |
| JEL: | F12 F15 J31 J51 L16 L6 L8 O33 O52 |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:urb:wpaper:19_01&r=all |
| By: | Federico Etro |
| Abstract: | I study monopolistic competition in patent races where firms are heterogeneous in R&D costs. Only the most efficient firms invest, and they invest more when the value of innovation is higher, while the endogenous set of active firms depends on the profitability of innovation. In particular, selection effect (increasing R&D productivity) emerge after a reduction of the entry cost or after an increase (a reduction) of the value of innovation if the elasticity of the probability of innovation is increasing (decreasing) in investment. In Schumpeterian models selection effects foster endogenous growth. |
| Keywords: | Patent races, heterogeneous firms, monopolistic competition, Schumpeterian growth. |
| JEL: | L1 O3 O4 |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:frz:wpaper:wp2019_09.rdf&r=all |
| By: | Anabela Marques Santos; Michele Cincera |
| Abstract: | Access to finance is a key driver of business activities. It can help firms to grow and innovate. However, due to market failures innovative firms are usually more financinally constrained. To improve access to financing for risky but excellent R&D and innovation investment projects, a new debt-financing instrument called “Risk Sharing Finance Facility” was created in 2007, by a joint initiative of the European Commission and the European Investment Bank. Based on a macro-economic analysis, the aim of the paper is to assess the effect of this new debt-financing instrument on enhancing private R&D expenditure. The database used covers the 28 Member States of the European Union in the period 2007-2016. Private R&D decision is estimated by a function of output growth and several R&D policy instruments. The methodological approach is based on a fixed effect model with control function method in order to correct for endogenous bias of Risk Sharing Finance. The results reveal a positive and significant effect of the new EU policy financing instrument on Private R&D expenditure and its rate of return seems to be higher than that of grants or subsidies. Furthermore, in countries where government funding for private R&D expenditure is above the average, the effect of Risk Sharing Finance shows a lower marginal effect. No evidence of significant differences concerning the size of the effect of the new debt-financing instrument is found when differentiating the level of R&D tax incentives. |
| Keywords: | Financing, Innovation, Risk |
| Date: | 2018–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ict:wpaper:2013/284016&r=all |
| By: | Majah-Leah V. Ravago (Ateneo de Manila University); Arlan Zandro I. Brucal (Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, The London School of Economics and Political Science); James Roumasset (University of Hawaii); Jan Carlo Punongbayan (University of the Philippines,Diliman) |
| Abstract: | The Philippines provides an extreme example of Rodrik’s observation that late developing countries experience deindustrialization at lower levels of per capita income than more advanced economies. Previous studies point to the role of protectionist policies, financial crises, and currency overvaluation as explanations for the shrinking share of the industry sector. We complement this literature by examining the role of electricity prices in the trajectory of industry share. We make use of data at the country level for 33 countries over the period 1980-2014 and at the Philippine regional level for 16 regions over the period 1990-2014. We find that higher electricity prices tend to amplify deindustrialization, causing industry share to turn downward at a lower peak and a lower per capita income, and to decline more steeply than otherwise. In a two-country comparison, we find that power intensive manufacturing subsectors have expanded more rapidly in Indonesia, where electricity prices have been low, whereas Philippine manufacturing has shifted toward less power-intensive and more labor-intensive subsectors in the face of high prices. |
| Keywords: | electricity prices, structural transformation, deindustrialization |
| JEL: | O10 O14 Q40 Q41 |
| Date: | 2019–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hai:wpaper:201905&r=all |
| By: | Tobias Schlegel (University of Zurich); Curdin Pfister (University of Zurich); Dietmar Harhoff (Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition); Uschi Backes-Gellner (University of Zurich) |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates whether differences in regional economic preconditions lead to heterogeneity of innovation spillovers from newly established universities of applied sciences (UASs). Exploiting a quasi-random establishment of UASs in the 1990s in Switzerland, we analyse the heterogeneity of innovation spillovers from these UASs due to differences in regional economic preconditions — i.e. economic strength, industry structure and economic density. Our estimations show that stronger and denser regional economies and regions with high tech intensive industries exhibited significantly more innovation spillovers from new UASs than regions with less favourable economic preconditions. One possible explanation are agglomeration effects favouring innovation spillovers. Our results imply that nearby UASs do not have positive effects on innovation per se, a finding that is of particular interest for policy makers who decide on the location of public applied research institutions. |
| Keywords: | Research Institutions, Innovation, Regional Economic Activity |
| JEL: | I23 O38 R12 |
| Date: | 2019–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iso:educat:0161&r=all |
| By: | Brunel, Claire; Zylkin, Thomas |
| Abstract: | While we would expect that cross-border patents are used to protect a technology that is made available in another country, that technology could either be produced locally or imported. International patent filings could therefore be either complements or substitutes to international trade. This study combines data on patenting and trade for 149 countries and 249 industries between 1974 and 2006 with a "three-way" PPML panel data model that addresses several biases emphasized in the trade literature in order to provide a systematic analysis of how bilateral trade responds to cross-border patent filings. We find that cross-border patents have a positive (complementary) overall effect on the patent-filing country's exports to the patent-granting country and no effect overall on imports flowing in the opposite direction. These effects vary substantially across industries and destination markets. Patents promote significantly more bilateral export growth--and significantly less bilateral import growth--in less-differentiated industries and are found to have stronger effects on exports to more distant destinations. These findings support the interpretation that cross-border patents are mainly used to protect cost and/or quality innovations from being adopted by producers of competing products in the patent-granting country. |
| Keywords: | F10; F13; F14; O34; K33 |
| JEL: | F10 F13 F14 K33 O34 |
| Date: | 2019–03–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:92514&r=all |
| By: | Sara Amoroso (European Commission – JRC); Albert N. Link (Bryan School of Business and Economics University of North Carolina-Greensboro) |
| Abstract: | Intellectual property protection mechanisms (IPPMs) are critical to fostering innovation and their relevance has grown enormously with the increased trade in goods and services involving intellectual property. Scholars have investigated what factors facilitate or hinder the use of such IP protection strategies, identifying country, sector, and firm characteristics. However, the extant literature has overlooked the role of founding team characteristics on the choice of IPPMs. Using data from a large sample of European small and young entrepreneurial firms, we show that controlling for size, R&D intensity, and other firms and market effects, the founding team characteristics such as gender and education greatly influence the choice of IPPMs. |
| Keywords: | IP choice, patents, appropriability, entrepreneurship, knowledge intensive firms, gender, AEGIS survey |
| JEL: | M13 L26 O34 |
| Date: | 2019–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ipt:wpaper:201901&r=all |