Local increasing returns associated with static and dynamic scale effects, knowledge spillovers, polarization effects and the distance that separates different regions are among the most important driving forces behind the dynamics of economic and technological convergence. This paper puts...

Considering the French case of Free Software Services Companies (FSSCs), this paper analyses free software's market-oriented aspects. We try to answer a fundamental question for free software: does the software industry have room for an alternative economic model based on the communities' ethic?...

Patents act as an incentive to innovate. However, as this paper argues, patents can discourage some innovators from innovating, reducing knowledge spillovers. The combined result of the above suggests a concave relationship between patent protection and output growth.

We propose a general theory of innovation that illustrates the relative benefits of performing process versus product R&D when firm size is endogenous. A firm's size, scope, and R&D portfolio are shown to reflect the same underlying characteristic of the firm, namely manufacturing efficiency. We...

It is often argued that drug companies do not wish to carry out post-approval head-to-head clinical trials, since their drugs may be revealed as being no better than existing drugs. However, we show that standard models for vertical differentiation predicts that pharmaceutical companies would in...

The Porter hypothesis postulates that the costs of compliance with environmental standards may be offset by adoption of innovations they trigger. We model this hypothesis using a game of timing of technology adoption. We will show that times of adoption will be earlier if the non-adoption tax is...

A considerable share of R&D investment is due to multinational firms that simultaneously operate R&D bases at home and abroad. We develop a simple model of foreign and domestic R&D investment and test the model's predictions on a sample of 146 Japanese multinational firms' R&D investments in...

We investigate co-operative innovative activity in four major European countries, France, Germany, Spain and the UK, using internationally comparable firm-level data for manufacturing and service sectors. We examine the roles of knowledge flows, cost- and risk-sharing and public financial...

Technological knowledge can be understood as a collective good only when its production requires the absorption and integration of external knowledge. Such external knowledge is the outcome of R&D investments that cannot be fully appropriated by firms and generate spillovers. The exploitation of...

This study aims to demonstrate that the concentration (or distribution) of firm R&D intensities within an industry is closely related to the overall R&D intensity of the industry. Unlike the well-studied relationship between sales concentration, or market structure, and industry R&D intensity,...