Publications
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Multilevel heterogeneity of R&D cooperation and innovation determinants Eurasian Business Review. DOI:10.1007/s40821-015-0041-1
Assessing the impact of public support to innovation on R&D collaboration may require a more complex multilevel design, that describes… Show more the likely correlation present among firms characteristics within a particular sector. Using data from the 2006 edition of the Community Innovation Survey (CIS) for the Netherlands, we propose a methodology to study the effect of firm-level characteristics on the propensity to undertake a research collaborative agreement. In particular, we show that controlling for a richer variance structure yields a different picture with respect to simpler regression frameworks adopted in the literature of R&D cooperation determinants. Moreover, such a hierarchical framework can be generalized allowing for clustering at higher levels, such as sectors or geographical areas. Besides the link between public funding and R&D collaboration, our results confirm the findings of the literature: technological spillovers, risk and cost sharing rationales, firm's size, and type of innovative activity are related to the decision of engaging in different sorts of research alliances. Show less
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Sector dynamics and demographics of top R&D firms in the global economy
This paper investigates the sectoral dynamics of the major economies during the last decade through the lens of the top… Show more 1000 R&D investors worldwide and looks at how firms' demographics are related to sector distribution. In doing so, it contributes to the literature on the EU corporate R&D intensity gap as well as on that on industrial dynamics. Contrary to the common understanding, the results show that in the EU the distribution of R&D among sectors has changed more than in the USA, which has experienced a shift mainly towards ICT-related sectors. In both the EU and the USA the pace of R&D change is slower than in the emerging economies. Furthermore, the EU has been better able than the USA and Japan to maintain its world share of R&D investment. Even more interestingly, the results show that age is strongly related to the sector (and dominant technology) in which firms operate. This suggests that focusing on sector (technological) dynamics could be even more relevant from a policy perspective than focusing only on young leading innovators. In fact, EU firms are less able to create or enter new high-tech sectors in a timely way and fully exploit the growth opportunities offered by first mover advantages. Show less
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PDF Regulation, red tape and location choices of top R&D investors
This paper investigates how product and labour market regulations and red tape affect the way in which top corporate research… Show more and development (R&D) investors worldwide organise their cross-border operations. The decision about where a company locates its international subsidiaries is modelled using location-specific framework conditions, socio-economic factors and other controls commonly used in the economic geography literature. The location decision drivers are estimated using a multilevel mixed-effects logistic regression, controlling for both fixed and random effects. Our results confirm that both product market regulation (PMR) and employment protection legislation (EPL) significantly affect the location decisions of top R&D investors, as well as red tape and profit tax. The marginal effect of PMR is by far the largest, followed by EPL; the cost of starting a business and profit tax show lower marginal effects. Moreover, we found that (i) PMR and EPL are complementary (i.e. reducing one would also reduce the negative impact of the other) and (ii) of the three components of the PMR indicator —barriers to trade and investment, state control and barriers to entrepreneurship—the latter is the one with the lowest marginal effect. Policy implications are drawn accordingly. Show less
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Corporate R&D intensity decomposition: Theoretical, empirical and policy issues
Research and development (R&D) indicators are increasingly used not only to facilitate international comparisons, but also as targets for policies… Show more stimulating research. An example of such an indicator is R&D intensity. The decomposition method of R&D intensity was conceived with the aim of evaluating aggregate R&D intensity and explaining the differences in R&D intensity between countries. For policy purposes, it is particularly important to determine whether the differences are intrinsic (e.g. due to firms' underinvestment in R&D) or structural (e.g. due to differences in the sectors that make up an economy). Despite its importance for analytical purposes, the theoretical and methodological framework enabling decomposition of corporate R&D intensity has been elaborated only recently, and it is still not commonly used in the literature. Moreover, examination of the R&D intensity of firms in different industries and at different layers of aggregation leads to mixed results, the reasons for which are not fully understood. This paper aims to review the theoretical and methodological frameworks of corporate R&D intensity decomposition and how it is applied in the literature in order to determine the policy implications of empirical results that at first sight may seem to be contradictory. More specifically, this paper surveys the literature to determine (i) the theoretical framework of determinants of corporate R&D intensity, (ii) the methodologies that have been put in place to decompose corporate R&D intensity and the empirical results reached and (iii) the likely reasons for the contrasting results. Finally, the paper points out the possible policy implications and suggests some potential avenues for future research in this area. Show less
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Who's doing who? Growth of sales, employment, assets, profits and R&D entangled in a curious five-way love triangle
Understanding causal relationships among key economic variables is crucial for policy makers, who wish to e.g. stimulate private R&D growth.… Show more To this end, we applied a technique recently imported from the Machine Learning community (Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVARs) identified using Independent Components Analysis (ICA)) to a set of the world's largest R&D investors. Our analysis highlights the key role of sales growth, rather than profits growth, in stimulating R&D growth. R&D growth appears at the end of the causal ordering of the growth process.Our results suggest that policies to increase private R&D would do better to target sales rather than profits. Show less
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Diversity in one dimension alongside greater similarity in others: Evidence from FP7 cooperative research teams
Although diversity between team members may bring benefits of new perspectives, nevertheless, what holds a team together is similarity. We… Show more theorise that diversity in one dimension is traded off against diversity in another. Our analysis of collaborative research teams that received FP7 funding presents robust results that indicators of diversity in several dimensions (diversity of organizational form (universities, firms, etc.), diversity in nationality and inequality in project funding share) are negatively correlated with each other. Show less
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EU corporate R&D intensity gap: What has changed over the last decade?
This paper contributes with new findings to the literature on corporate research and development (R&D) intensity decomposition by examining the… Show more effects of several parameters on R&D intensity and investigating its comparative distribution among top R&D firms, sectors and world regions/countries. It draws on a longitudinal company-level micro-dataset from 2005 to 2013, and uses both descriptive statistics and decomposition computation methods. The results confirm the structural nature of the EU R&D intensity gap. In the last decade the gap between the EU and the US has widened, whereas the EU gap with Japan and Switzerland has remained relatively stable. The study also uncovers differences in R&D intensity between EU and US companies operating in the sectors more responsible for the aggregate R&D intensity gap. In contrast, the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and Asian Tiger countries (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan) R&D intensity gap compared to the EU has remained relatively stable, while companies from the rest of the world are considerably reducing such gap. Finally, the study shows a high concentration -sustained over time- of R&D investment in a few countries, sectors and firms, but in the EU there are fewer smaller top R&D firms that invest more intensively in R&D, than in the most closed competing countries. Show less
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Technological diffusion as a recombinant process
In this work we analyse patterns of technological development using patent applications at the United States Patent and Trademark Office… Show more (USPTO) over the 1973-2012 period. Our study focuses on the combinations of technological fields within patent documents and their evolution in time, which can be modelled as a diffusion process. By focusing on the combinatorial dimension of the process we obtain insights that complement those from counting patents. Our results show that the density of the technological knowledge network increased and that the majority of technological fields became more interconnected over time. We find that most technologies follow a similar diffusion path that can be modelled as a Logistic or Gompertz function, which can then be used to estimate the time to maturity defined as the year at which the diffusion process for a specific technology slows down. This allows us to identify a set of promising technologies which are expected to reach maturity in the next decade. Our contribution represents a first step in assessing the importance of diffusion and cross-fertilization in the development of new technologies, which could support the design of targeted and effective Research and Innovation and Industrial policies. Show less
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PDF The 2016 Survey on R&D Investment Business Trends
The EU R&D Survey is a yearly survey amongst the top 1000 EU-based R&D investing companies from the R&D Scoreboard.… Show more The 157 participating companies in this report declared a total R&D investment from their own resources of €59.3 billion in 2015, or one third of the total R&D investment by the 1000 companies of the 2015 EU Scoreboard. The main findings are as follows: The R&D investments expectation for the years 2016 & 17 is characterised by a decrease for big companies from the automobiles & parts sector (-0.8%). This is in stark contrast with the last two R&D Surveys where companies from this sector foresaw a healthy growth figure (around 4%) for the years 2014-15 and 2015-16. Positive expectations of R&D investments growth are the strongest in the high-tech sectors, specifically in Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals and Technology Hardware, with foreseen growth of around 7-8%. Overall the companies in the Survey expect R&D investments to grow by 1.4% p.a. as compared to 3.0% in last year's Survey. The decrease in growth expectations is mainly due to the above negative expectations in the automobiles sector, which weigh heavily on the overall sample. Without this effect, growth expectations would have been 3.8%. Growth expectations also vary by world region. The EU is the region where the lowest growth is to be expected (0.5%). India (10%), the rest of the world (4.6%) and non-EU European countries (4.5%) expect the highest growth. China shows a striking difference with previous years having passed from double digit expectations to a mere 3.1% due to shrinkage in the automobiles & parts sector. Without the companies from the automobiles & parts sector, the expectations for China would be 8 percentage points higher (11.5%) as well as 2 percentage points higher for all the other world regions. Companies tend to concentrate R&D activities in fewer locations than production activities: 34% of the companies perform R&D in 1 or 2 locations, while for production this is only 17%. The automobiles & parts sector remains the largest employer for highly-skilled workers in the EU. The sectors aerospace & defence, chemicals, oil & gas producers are characterised by a high share of R&D employees as of total employees. Labour costs are rather unimportant for deciding the location of R&D or production activities. Companies attach much more value to high availability of personnel and knowledge, access to (economically and politically stable) markets and proximity to other activities within the company. Regarding the Commission's structural reforms being pursued, the respondents see a higher potential of product market reforms and market regulation for increasing their R&D and innovation than labour market reforms. Show less
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PDF The 2016 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard
The 2016 edition of the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard (the Scoreboard) analyses the 2500 companies investing the largest sums… Show more in R&D in the world in the fiscal year 2015/16. It comprises companies based in the EU (590), the US (837), Japan (356), China (327), Taiwan (111), South Korea (75), Switzerland (58) and further 20 countries. Show less