Are R&D collaborative agreements persistent at the firm level? Empirical evidence for the Spanish case

We provide evidence on the dynamics in firms’ R&D cooperation behaviour. Our main objective is to analyse if R&D collaborative agreements are persistent at the firm level, and in such a case, to study what are the main drivers of this phenomenon. R&D cooperation activities at the firm level can be persistent due to true state dependence, this implying that cooperating in a given period enhances the probability of doing it in the subsequent period and it can also be a consequence of firms’ individual heterogeneity, so that certain firms have certain characteristics that make them more likely to carry out technological alliances.

Are R&D collaborative agreements persistent at the firm level? Empirical evidence for the Spanish case

We provide evidence on the dynamics in firms’ R&D cooperation behaviour. Our main objective is to analyse if R&D collaborative agreements are persistent at the firm level, and in such a case, to study what are the main drivers of this phenomenon. R&D cooperation activities at the firm level can be persistent due to true state dependence, this implying that cooperating in a given period enhances the probability of doing it in the subsequent period and it can also be a consequence of firms’ individual heterogeneity, so that certain firms have certain characteristics that make them more likely to carry out technological alliances.

The Impact of Doing Business Regulations on Investments in ICT

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Singling out individual inventors from patent data

An increasing number of studies in recent years have sought to identify individual inventors from patent data. A variety of heuristics have been proposed for using the names and other information disclosed in patent documents to establish who is who in patents. This paper contributes to this literature by describing a methodology for identifying inventors using patents applied to the European Patent Office, EPO hereafter. As in much of this literature, we basically follow a threestep procedure : 1- the parsing stage, aimed at reducing the noise in the inventor’s name and other fields of the patent; 2- the matching stage, where name matching algorithms are used to group similar names; and 3- the filtering stage, where additional information and various scoring schemes are used to filter out these similarlynamed inventors. The paper presents the results obtained by using the algorithms with the set of European inventors applying to the EPO over a long period of time.

Productivity and innovation spillovers: Micro evidence from Spain

This article analyses the impact that innovation expenditure and intrasectoral and intersectoral externalities have on productivity in Spanish firms. While there is an extensive literature analysing the relationship between innovation and productivity, in this particular area there are far fewer studies that examine the importance of sectoral externalities, especially with the focus on Spain. One novelty of the study, which covers the industrial and service sectors, is that we also consider jointly the technology level of the sector in which the firm operates and the firm size. The database used is the Technological Innovation Panel, PITEC, which includes 12,813 firms for the year 2008 and has been little used in this type of study. The estimation method used is Iteratively Reweighted Least Squares method, IRLS, which is very useful for obtaining robust estimations in the presence of outliers. The results confirm that innovation has a positive effect on productivity, especially in high-tech and large firms. The impact of externalities is more heterogeneous because, while intrasectoral externalities have a poitive and significant effect, especially in low-tech firms independently of size, intersectoral externalities have a more ambiguous effect, being clearly significant for advanced industries in which size has a positive effect.

The Transatlantic Productivity Gap : Is R&D the Main Culprit?

The literature has pointed to different causes to explain the productivity gap between Europe and United States in the last decades. This paper tests the hypothesis that the lower European productivity performance in comparison with the US can be explained not only by a lower level of corporate R&D investment, but also by a lower capacity to translate R&D investment into productivity gains. The proposed microeconometric estimates are based on a unique longitudinal database covering the period 1990-2008 and comprising 1.809 US and European companies for a total of 16.079 observations. Consistent with previous literature, we find robust evidence of a significant impact of R&D on productivity, however – using different estimation techniques - the R&D coefficients for the US firms always turn out to be significantly higher. To see to what extent these transatlantic differences may be related to the different sectoral structures in the US and the EU, we differentiated the analysis by sectors. The result is that both in manufacturing, services and high-tech sectors US firms are more efficient in translating their R&D investments into productivity increases.

Cooperation in R&D, firm size and type of partnership: Evidence for the Spanish automotive industry

This paper aims to analyse cooperation in R&D in the automobile industry in Spain. It first examines to what extent firms cooperate with external actors in the field of technological innovation, and if so, with what type of cooperation partner, paying special attention to the differentiation according to the size of the firms. Second, it aims to study how the firm’s size may affect not only the decision of cooperating but also with which type of partner, while controlling for other determinants that have been considered in the literature as main drivers of collaborative activities in R&D. We use data provided by the Technological Innovation Panel in the 2006-2008 period for firms in the automotive sector. We estimate a bivariate probit model that takes into account the two types of cooperation mostly present in the automotive industry, vertical and institutional, explicitly considering the interdependencies that may arise in the simultaneous choice of both.

Cooperation in R&D, firm size and type of partnership: Evidence for the Spanish automotive industry

This paper aims to analyse cooperation in R&D in the automobile industry in Spain. It first examines to what extent firms cooperate with external actors in the field of technological innovation, and if so, with what type of cooperation partner, paying special attention to the differentiation according to the size of the firms. Second, it aims to study how the firm’s size may affect not only the decision of cooperating but also with which type of partner, while controlling for other determinants that have been considered in the literature as main drivers of collaborative activities in R&D. We use data provided by the Technological Innovation Panel in the 2006-2008 period for firms in the automotive sector. We estimate a bivariate probit model that takes into account the two types of cooperation mostly present in the automotive industry, vertical and institutional, explicitly considering the interdependencies that may arise in the simultaneous choice of both.

Evidence on the role of ownership structure on firms' innovative performance

Based on the Knowledge Production Function framework given by Griliches -1979-, we slightly modify it so that the innovative output depends upon a set of factors related to the firm internal characteristics and are influenced by the environment. Specifically, regarding the firm internal determinants the effect of the concentration of the ownership, the composition of the boards of directors and the effect of the nature of the ownership (foreign and public) are analyzed. Additionally, in order to capture the determinants of the environment in which the firm operates other variables concerning the internationalization of market, the agglomeration economies and the regional knowledge externalities are also considered. In order to assess the impact of these determinants on the number of patents and models of use awarded by the firm, the discreteness of the latter variable has to be taken into account. We apply Poisson and Negative Binomial models for a more comprehensive evaluation of the hypothesis in a panel of Spanish manufacturing firms. The results show patenting activity is positively favoured by being located in an environment with a high innovative activity, due to the existence of knowledge spillovers and agglomeration economies.

Does social capital reinforce technological inputs in the creation of knowledge? Evidence from the Spanish regions

In this paper we seek to verify the hypothesis that trust and cooperation between individuals, and between them and public institutions, can encourage technological innovation and the adoption of knowledge. Additionally, we test the extent to which the interaction of social capital with human capital and R&D expenditures improve their effect on a region’s ability to innovate. Our empirical evidence is taken from the Spanish regions and employs a knowledge production function and longitudinal count data models. Our results suggest that social capital correlates positively with innovation. Further, our analysis reveals a powerful interaction between human and social capital in the production of knowledge, whilst the complementarity with R&D efforts would seem less clear.

Corea del Sud i Catalunya

Els experts de l'OCDE creuen que és un risc que siguin les grans empreses i amb poca contribució de les PIME les que fan que Corea inverteixi tant en R+D. Prediuen que, sense canvis, això farà que s'aturi el ritme de creixement. Una de les coses que els experts de l'OCDE troben malament és que hi ha massa desconnexió entre els centres de recerca públics i les universitats i que l'orientació a la recerca fonamental sigui baixa i han d'importar massa coneixement. Les empreses tenen dificultat a trobar professionals prou capacitats en R+D, però alhora hi ha un drenatge de capital intel·lectual que marxa del país

La producción científica en el ámbito de la Economía y Empresa en España. Rankings de las universidades españolas en términos de producción, productividad, calidad e impacto en el período 1994-2003.

En este trabajo se analiza la situación de las publicaciones científicas en Economía y Empresa en España en el decenio 1994-2003. En concreto se analizan la producción de artículos, la productividad por investigador, la calidad de las publicaciones y su impacto (citas) y se elaboran rankings de las universidades españolas. Los principales resultados apuntan a unos niveles de producción científica que evolucionan de manera creciente en los últimos años. Esta mejora se debe al incremento de la plantilla y, sobre todo, al incremento de su productividad.

La recerca a Catalunya

El 29 d'abril el conseller d'Empresa i Ocupació deia que l'objectiu és aconseguir que l'any 2020 el pes dels sectors industrials en el PIB català arribi al 25%. La declaració oficial és que el govern aposta per una indústria més intensiva en innovació, en talent i inserida en l'economia global. Segons el govern es passa d'una declaració d'intencions a accions concretes d'aplicació immediata [...]

Catalan Policies and Experiences on Cooperative Repositories

The Centre de Supercomputació de Catalunya (CESCA) together with the Consorci de Biblioteques Universitàries de Catalunya (CBUC) started in 1999 a cooperative repository, named TDR, to file in digital format the full-text of the read thesis at the universities of our country to spread them worldwide in open access preserving the intellectual copyright of the authors. This became operational in 2001 and today it is a service fully consolidated not only among the Catalan universities, but also used by other Spanish universities. Since then, there are four additional cooperative repositories which have been created: RECERCAT, for research papers; RACO, for scientific, cultural and erudite Catalan magazines; PADICAT, for archiving Catalan web sites; and MDC, for Catalan digital collections of pictures, maps, posters, old magazines... These five repositories have some common characteristics: they are open access, that is, they are accessible on the internet for free; they mostly comply with the Open Archive Initiative interoperability protocol for facilitating the efficient dissemination of content; and they have been built in a cooperative manner so that it is easy to adopt common procedures and to share the repository developing and managing costs, it permits more visibility of the indexed documents throughout the search engines, and a better provision for long-term preservation can be made. In this paper we present the common policy established for the Catalan cooperative repositories, we describe the five of them briefly, and we comment on the results obtained of our 6-year experience since the first one became operational.