Publications
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PDF Firm market valuation and intellectual property assets
This paper investigates the relationship between the innovative activity of the top corporate R&D investors worldwide and their market valuation.… Show more The analysis exploits a sample of more than 1,250 publicly listed Multinational Corporations (MNCs) and their intellectual property rights (IPR) – patents and trademarks – filed between 2005 and 2012. The study contributes to the literature on the IPR-market value link by examining the premium resulting from the interactive use of different IPR. Moreover, the empirical setting allows differentiating the effects of an increase in market value derived from additional IPR (within-effects) with respect to the premium received for holding more IPR than the competitors (between-effects). The findings suggest that investors value the simultaneous use of the two IPRs and form their expectations by benchmarking firms. Finally, significant industrial specificities are observed in the individual effects of patents, trademarks and their interactions on the market value of firms. Show less
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PDF Teaming up with Large R&D Investors: Good or Bad for Knowledge Production and Diffusion?
The participation of top R&D players to publicly funded research collaborations is a common yet unexplored phenomenon. If, on the… Show more one hand, including top R&D firms creates opportunities for knowledge spillovers and increases the chance for a project to be funded, on the other hand, the uneven nature of such partnerships and the asymmetry in knowledge appropriation capabilities could hinder the overall performance of such collaborations. In this paper, we study the role of top R&D investors in the performance of publicly funded R&D consortia (in terms of number of patents and publications). Using a unique dataset that matches information on R&D collaborative projects and proposals with data on international top R&D firms, we find that indeed teaming up with leading R&D firms increases the probability to obtain funds. However, the participation of such R&D leaders hinders the innovative performance of the funded projects, both in terms of patents and publications. In light of this evidence, the benefits of mobilizing top R&D players should be carefully leveraged in the evaluation and design of innovation policies aimed at R&D collaboration and technology diffusion. Show less
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PDF Concordance and complementarity in IP instruments
This work investigates the relationship between proxies of innovation activities, such as patents and trademarks, and firm performance in terms… Show more of revenues, growth and profitability. By resorting to the virtual universe of Italian manufacturing firms this work provides a rather complete picture of the Intellectual Property (IP) strategies pursued by Italian firms, in terms of patents and trademarks, and we study whether the two instruments for protecting IP exhibit complementarity or substitutability. In addition, and to our knowledge novel, we propose a measure of concordance (or proximity) between the patents and trademarks owned by the same firm and we then investigate whether such concordance exert any effect on performance. Show less
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PDF A geography of corporate knowledge flows across world regions: evidence from patent citations of top R&D-investing firm
This exploratory study looks at the structural and geographical patterns of corporate knowledge flows from a regional perspective. The methodological… Show more approach combines the centrality indicators developed in the social network analysis (SNA) and complementary tools from the graphs theory to assess the betweenness centrality of regions (or poles) their ability to control knowledge flows within a network or to impact its cohesiveness and the relative contribution of individual firms (or layers) to the centrality of regions. The combination of the two approaches brings relevant insights on the way large R&D-driven firms organise their knowledge sourcing and generation across world regions. Show less
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PDF What are the policy options? A systematic review of policy responses to the impacts of robotisation and automation on the labour market
Three main policy responses to the labour market challenges posed by robotisation and automation have emerged in the research literature.… Show more The first is ‘taxing robots' and using this revenue to introduce a basic income that could offset the negative impacts of replacing humans by robots. The second option highlights the ownership of robots so that taking part in the new source of wealth is possible. The third focuses on strengthening the comparative advantages, the creativity, and the social intelligence of humans that robots will never be able to match. All of these policy responses are supported by economic rationales and research findings but a systematic review shows that all of them raise further questions and challenges that should be carefully investigated in order to choose the right path. This paper offers a comprehensive overview of these questions. Furthermore, in a broader sense these policy options—redistributing the benefits of technological changes, increasing accesses to the benefits and utilisation of changes, and supporting the individual and institutional adjustment to changes—are relevant to every technological transformation. Hence, the lessons that are drawn from the current discussion of policy options driven by specific technologies, robotization, and automation might serve as a precursor to potential policy responses triggered by other technologies. Show less
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PDF Intellectual Property Protection Mechanisms and the Characteristics of Founding Teams
Intellectual property protection mechanisms (IPPMs) are critical to fostering innovation and their relevance has grown enormously with the increased trade… Show more 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. Show less
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PDF From R&D to market: using trademarks to capture the market capability of top R&D investors
This paper investigates the links between the market capability of top corporate R&D investors (EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboards), as… Show more captured by trademark data and their economic performance in terms of net sales growth. It provides empirical evidence to better understand the extent to which companies, operating in different industrial sectors, combine technological capabilities with commercialization efforts to generate and appropriate the economic returns of their R&D investments. This paper shows how different dimensions of firms' market capabilities can be captured through trademark indicators. The results suggest that complementing R&D efforts and patenting activities with strong and specific market capabilities can indeed yield significant growth premiums. Moreover, offering services seems to pay off depending on the intensity of R&D investments. Yet, a quantile regression approach and a series of robustness checks indicate that such effects differ across the quantiles of the conditional sales growth distribution. Show less
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PDF Do firms publish? A multi-sectoral analysis
We examine corporate publishing - i.e. firms' involvement in the production of scientific publications - with two research questions. First,… Show more why do firms publish? Through systematic literature review, we propose a framework of five incentives for firms to publish: (i) accessing external knowledge and resources; (ii) attracting and retaining researchers; (iii) signalling and reputation building; (iv) supporting IP strategies; and (v) supporting commercialization strategies. Second, how does firms' engagement in publishing differ across sectors? Variation in corporate publishing has not yet been comprehensively characterized in the literature. We present an empirical analysis of the publication activity of a global sample of 2,500 firms (and the 570,000 directly owned subsidiaries of these firms) operating in 20 industrial sectors. We find that corporate publishing is widespread, though considerable heterogeneity exists within and between sectors. Most firms (84%) in our sample contributed to at least one publication from 2011 to 2015. The number of firms' publications grew over the observation period (2.3% on a yearly basis), though not as fast as the global science output in general. Firms' publications are often co-authored with researchers at academic institutions (58%) and are cited more than expected (about 12% of firms' articles are within the top 10% most cited articles). We conclude by proposing a taxonomy of sectors based on their R&D investment intensity and publication activity. Show less
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PDF Heterogeneity of technology-specific R&D investments. Evidence from top R&D investors worldwide
In this work, we develop and apply a methodology to estimate technology-specific R&D investments at firm level. To do so,… Show more we combine R&D investment with patent data from the world top R&D investors worldwide and show that investment per patent varies greatly across technologies and across firms developing a given technology. We then use these results to assess the relationship between technology-specific R&D investments and a series of factors characterizing technological development. The estimation strategy makes use of a multilevel framework that allows modelling heterogeneity at the firm and sector level. In line with the literature on the sectoral systems of innovation, we find that sector specificities matter in determining R&D per patent investments, economies of scale in knowledge production, and the cost associated to technological specialization. Moreover, our results suggest that the persistent differences in R&D intensity across firms may be largely related to the technological choices they make. Firms' idiosyncrasies co-exist with significant differences across sectors in shaping knowledge production functions. Implications for policy and research are discussed accordingly. Show less
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PDF Inward greenfield FDI and patterns of job polarization
The unprecedented growth in FDI in the last decades has caused drastic changes in the labour markets of the host… Show more countries. The major part of FDI takes place in low tech industries, where the wages and skills are low, or in high tech, where they offer a wage premium for the highly skilled workers. This mechanism may increase the polarization of employment into high-wage and low-wage jobs, at the expenses of middle-skill jobs. This paper looks at the effects of two types of FDI inflows, namely foreign investment in high-skill and low-skill activities, on skill polarization. We match data on greenfield FDI aggregated by country and sector with data on employment by occupational skill to investigate the extent to which differ types of greenfield FDI are responsible for skill polarization. Show less