Publications
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PDF The Distribution of Technological Activities in Europe: A Regional Perspective
This study analyses the major patterns and trends in the spatial distribution of technological capacities in the EU area over… Show more the 1996-2011 period, adopting a regional perspective. More specifically, the study aims at: a) assessing the level of technological polarization in the EU area and its dynamics; b) highlighting major changes in the patterns of technological specialization of EU regions; c) identifying the technological trajectories that have been more effective, that is able to sustain long-term economic growth and facilitate catching-up processes of EU laggard regions. Show less
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My First Employee: An Empirical Investigation. Small Business Economics, forthcoming. DOI:10.1007/s11187-016-9748-3
The challenge for solo entrepreneurs to add their first employee is arguably the single biggest growth event facing any growing… Show more firm. To understand how this event affects performance, and the antecedents of hiring, we analyse Danish matched employer–employee data. Those who hire enjoy superior sales outcomes in subsequent years, while the dispersion in profits increases. Furthermore, those that hire enjoy faster sales growth in the previous year, suggesting that sales growth precedes the first hire. Finally, we show that founders with a stronger profile in terms of education and previous income are more likely to increase profits, while the characteristics of the employee are less important. The latter finding is important from a job creation perspective, in light of the suggested sorting of more marginalized employees into new and established firms. Show less
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PDF Study on tools for causal inference from cross-sectional innovation surveys with continuous or discrete variables
Dominik Janzing, from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, recently finished a subcontracted report entitled "Tools for causal inference… Show more from cross-sectional innovation surveys with continuous or discrete variables." The machine learning community has recently developed some exciting new techniques for causal inference from observational data, which work even for discrete variables. In this project, Dominik applied these techniques to analyse Scoreboard data (on the world's largest R&D investors) as well as Community Innovation Survey data. The report contains a large number of results, and also makes the software available for future research. Show less
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PDF Top R&D investors' location decisions: How to succeed in the global regulatory contest?
Headlines Product regulation policies and employment policies show strong combined effects on decisions regarding top R&D investment locations. The higher… Show more the level of product market regulation (PMR), the higher the negative effect of employment protection legislation (EPL), and vice-versa. Reforms in these two policy areas should therefore be coordinated to be more efficient. Scientific evidence suggests a threshold of product regulation above which existing employment policies can start deterring investment decisions. Some Member States would particularly benefit from diminishing current levels of product regulation. Lowering barriers to trade and investment is more effective for attracting knowledge-intensive foreign investment than reducing the cost of starting a business or deducing the corporate income tax rate. Show less
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Innovation and firm growth: Does firm age play a role? Research Policy, Vol. 45, pp. 387– 400. DOI:10.1016/j.respol.2015.10.015
This paper explores the relationship between innovation and firm growth for firms of different ages. We hypothesize that young firms… Show more undertake riskier innovation activities which may have greater performance benefits (if successful), or greater losses (if unsuccessful). Using an extensive Spanish Community Innovation Survey sample for the period 2004–2012, we apply panel quantile regressions to study the effect of R&D activities on firm growth (i.e. sales growth, productivity growth and employment growth). Our results show that young firms face larger performance benefits from R&D at the upper quantiles of the growth rate distribution, but face larger decline at the lower quantiles. R&D investment by young firms therefore appears to significantly riskier than R&D investment by more mature firms, which suggests some policy implications. Show less
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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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PDF 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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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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PDF 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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PDF 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