The paper provides empirical evidence for the causal impact of broadband Internet on firms’ labour productivity and realised process and product innovations. The analysis refers to the early phase of DSL expansion in Germany from 2001 to 2003, when roughly 60 percent of the German firms already used broadband Internet. Identification relies on instrumental variable estimation taking advantage o...

This paper has two main objectives. First, it estimates the impact of related and unrelated variety of European regions’ knowledge structure on their patenting activity. Second, it looks at the role of technological relatedness and extra-local knowledge acquisitions for local innovative activity. Specifically, it assesses how external technological relatedness affects regional innovation perfor...

This paper provides an overview of the relationship between entrepreneurship university spin-off activity and economic growth. It suggests the need for a diversified university structure, and that spin-offs are a misleading measure of the most important activity for technology transfer which remains the training and education of highly qualified scientists and technologists. It argues that a li...

We provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of the links between international services outsourcing, wages and innovation using plant level data covering the period 2000 to 2004. Somewhat consistent with the predictions of recent theory, we observe a positive relationship between international outsourcing of services and innovative activity, measured in terms of R&D, at the plant level. Howev...

This paper studies whether labor scarcity encourages technological advances, i.e., technology adoption or innovation, for example, as claimed by Habakkuk in the context of 19th-century United States. I de…ne technology as strongly labor saving if technological advances reduce the marginal product of labor and as strongly labor complementary if they increase it. I show that labor scarcity encour...

I develop a model of R&D cooperation with uncertain research outcomes. In this model asymmetric outcomes of R&D competition emerge naturally. Therefore ex-ante and ex-post R&D cooperation can be studied as alternatives for firms. Using this model I compare welfare losses under ex-ante and ex-post R&D cooperation as the degree of product market competition varies. It emerges that the relative si...

We provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of the links between international services outsourcing, wages and innovation using plant level data covering the period 2000 to 2004. Somewhat consistent with the predictions of recent theory, we observe a positive relationship between international outsourcing of services and innovative activity, measured in terms of R&D, at the plant level. Howev...

The theoretical literature on the cumulative innovation process has emphasized the role of ex-ante licensing namely, licensing agreements negotiated before the follow-on innovator has sunk its R&D investment in mitigating the risk of hold-up of future innovations. In this paper, we consider a patent-holder and a follow-on innovator bargaining over the licensing terms in a context where the form...

We investigate the effects of consumers’ environmental concerns and market competition on firms’ decisions to innovate in “clean” technologies. Agents care about their consumption footprint; firms pursue greener products soften price competition. Acting as complements, these forces determine R&D, pollution, welfare. test theory using panel data patents by 7,060 automobile sector 25 countrie...