The Relationship between R&D Collaboration, Subsidies and Patenting Activity: Empirical Evidence from Finland and Germany

This study focuses on the impact of innovation policies and R&D collaboration in Germany and Finland. We consider collaboration and subsidies as heterogeneous treatments, and perform an econometric matching to analyze R&D and patent activity at the firm level. In general, we find that collaboration has positive effects. In Germany, subsidies for individual research do not exhibit a significant impact neither on R&D nor patenting, but the innovative performance could be improved by additional incentives for collaboration. For Finnish companies, public funding is an important source of finance for R&D. Without subsidies, recipients would show less R&D and patenting activity, whilst those firms not receiving subsidies would perform significantly better if they were publicly funded. --R&D,Public Subsidies,Collaboration,Policy Evaluation

Why do Firms Co-operate for Innovation? - A comparison of Austrian and Finnish CIS 3 results

This paper analyzes co-operative behavior of innovative firms in Finland and Austria. We use data from the third wave of the Community Innovation Survey (CIS 3). Descriptive statistics indicate that the rate of innovators is quite similar in Austria and Finland, while the number of co-operating enterprises is considerably higher in Finland. Econometric analysis reveals that a number of factors that determine co-operative arrangements are only significant in the one or the other country. We conclude that co-operative behavior in the two countries is much more dependent on national factors and much deeper rooted in the underlying innovation systems than the existing literature may assume.co-operation, CIS 3, Austria, Finland

A Conceptual Framework to Model Long-Run Qualitative Change in the Energy System

This paper deals with a conceptual framework allowing the analysis of long-run qualitative change in the energy system. The energy sector seems to be particularly appropriate for the analysis of qualitative change due to the following reasons: The energy sector is relevant for the development of the whole economy. When looking on the development of primary energy resources it becomes obvious that different energy sources are of different importance over time and that new energy sources enter the scene from time to time. E.g. the importance of wood is decreasing over last 200 years, whereas coal has reached its peak around the turn of the last century, natural gas entered the scene not before that time. Nuclear energy technologies emerge in the energy supply only after 1960s. Furthermore, compared to other sectors qualitative change in the energy sector proceeds in relative long time periods. Accordingly, different mechanisms and effects are comparatively easier to separate as not too many overlapping developments are considered to appear simultaneously, which makes the discrimination of causes and effects more difficult. Related to this, it is not invention that plays a particular important role but it is both innovation as the first commercial application and diffusion as the spreading out of the new technologies. This means that in the analysis strong technological uncertainty does play a minor role, most often the relevant technologies do already exist as blue-prints and the transformation process basically deals with the application and improvement of these technologies.energy; qualitative change; agend based models

Improving policy understanding by means of secondary analyses of policy evaluation : a concept development

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Analyzing Inefficiency Using a Frontier Search Approach

Efficiency measurement naturally requires the definition of a frontier as a benchmark indicating efficiency. Usually a measure reflecting the distance of a data point to the frontier indicates the level of efficiency. One of the crucial characteristics to distinguish efficiency measurement tools is the way in which they construct the frontier. The class of deterministic and non parametric tools of constructing the frontier mainly comprises of tools associated with Data Envelopment Analysis. Coming in various flavors all DEA frontiers suffer of their piecewise construction giving rise to numerous vertices. Those vertices do not allow convenient analysis of the frontier properties such as computing elasticities and the like. In this paper we want to contribute to the class of deterministic and non parametric tools of constructing the frontier in an one output and n input setting. We suggest a new empirical approach drawing on functional search in the fashion of Koza's (1992) genetic programming. The frontier search algorithm employed evolves the functional form of the frontier and the parameters simultaneously. The frontier exhibits the neat property that it is smooth and differentiable enabling the computation of elasticities,for example. In particular we introduce both the idea and the algorithm of the frontier search procedure. We discuss the advantages and shortcomings with respect to empirical problems. The arguments brought forth in the preceding sections are illustrated by the investigation of an artificial example.

Do direct R&D subsidies lead to the monopolization of R&D in the economy?

This paper explores the impact of R&D subsidies on the concentration of R&D in an economy. First, governments are often criticized of subsidizing predominantly larger firms and thus contribute to persistence of leadership in markets and higher barriers to entry, and, hence, reduced competition eventually. Second, theoretical literature, such as endogenous growth literature, has also shown that governmental intervention in the market for R&D affects the distribution of R&D which finally affects product market concentration. We test the relationship between R&D subsidies and R&D concentration employing treatment effects models on data of German and Finnish manufacturing firms. The data and estimations allow calculating concentration indices for the population of firms for both the actual situation where some selected companies receive R&D subsidies and the counterfactual situation describing the absence of subsidies. We find that R&D subsidies do not lead to higher concentration of R&D. On the contrary, we even find that R&D concentration is significantly reduced because of subsidies. This result may be attributed to the fact that technology policy maintains special funding schemes for small and medium-sized companies. The fact that the larger companies benefit from a higher likelihood of a subsidy receipt is offset by the phenomenon that smaller firms may be completely deterred from any R&D activity if they would not receive governmental support

Product Innovation and Population Dynamics in the German Insurance Market

Empirical research in organizational ecology has mainly focused on analyzing founding and mortality rates using life history data of the organizations. We try to extend this approach in our study in a number of ways. In contrast to most empirical studies in organizational ecology, we chose a population of service organizations, in particular the German insurance companies, the development dynamics of which are rather obvious in the innovative activities of existing organizations than in founding activities. We further discuss the points of contact between the organizational ecology approach and the theory of industry life cycles and extend the analysis to the relationship between innovative activities and population dynamics. The study examines the effects of population density, former events, and organizational size and age structure in the population of property & casualty insurance companies on the number of product innovations generated. We will further develop a concept for an insurance specific industry life cycle with a non-typical maturation and degeneration phase.service industries; population ecology; industry life cycles

The Devil Dwells in the Tails A Quantile Regression Approach to Firm Growth

This paper explores the firm growth rate distribution in a Gibrat’s Law context. The aim is to provide an empirical exploration of the determinants of firm growth. The work is novel in two respects. First, rather than limiting the analysis to focus on the conditional mean growth level, we investigate the complete shape of the distribution. Second, we show that the differences in the firm growth rate process between large and small firms are highly circumstantial. That industry dynamics have a substantial influence on the relationship between firm size and firm growth. The data used includes more than 9000 Danish firms from manufacturing, services and construction. We provide robust evidence indicating that firm growth studies should be less obsessed with explaining means and instead look to other parts of the firm growth rate distribution.Firm growth; quantile regression; distribution shape

The Relationship between R&D Collaboration, Subsidies and Patenting Activity: Empirical Evidence from Finland and Germany

This study focuses on the impact of innovation policies and R&D collaboration in Germany and Finland. We consider collaboration and subsidies as heterogeneous treatments, and perform an econometric matching to analyze patent activity at the firm level. In general, we find that collaboration has positive effects. In Germany, subsidies for individual research do not exhibit a significant impact on patent activity, but the innovative performance could be improved by additional incentives for collaboration. For Finnish companies, public funding is an important source of finance for R&D. Without subsidies, recipients would show less patenting activity, whilst those firms not receiving subsidies would perform significantly better if they were publicly funded

Consumer choice and data envelopment analysis: the case of discrimination on housing markets

The objective of this paper is twofold. First we discuss, whether data envelopment analysis can be applied to households' consumption activities on the basis of Kelvin Lancaster's approach to consumer choice. Then, we apply data envelopment analysis to identify inefficiencies in a subsector of the Augsburg (Germany) housing market. These inefficiencies can be attributed to differential treatment by landlords. With these inefficiencies occuring systematically for certain householdtypes we conclude that discriminatory behavior exists