Research and development (R&D) is important for economic growth. Many countries therefore attempt to raise the investments in R&D. Increasingly important in this context are foreign direct investments in R&D, which on average constitute 24% of total business R&D investments in the EU15 (between...

Empirical findings state that the disclosure requirement might be a reason for firms to rely on secrecy rather than patents to protect their inventions. We choose a dynamic framework in which we can explicitly analyze the patenting decision reflecting the tradeoff between a positive protective...

This work aims to explain which factors determine the participation of Spanish companies in R&D consortia within the EU's Framework Programme (FP), considering that the probability that a firm takes part must be regarded as the result of a two-phase process. First, the firm decides whether to...

This paper analyses the current internationalisation of innovation activities and identifies the main drivers for the countries of the European Union (EU). We employ patent applications at the European Patent Office covering the period 2000-2005. Our results show that the internationalisation of...

This article examines the effects of intellectual property rights (IPR) protection on growth and convergence. Firms in a country undertake both innovation and imitation to improve their productivity. IPR protection reduces the cost of innovation, but makes imitation more costly. Countries at...

We apply a panel vector autoregression model to a firm-level longitudinal database to observe the co-evolution of sales growth, employment growth, profits growth and the growth of research and development (R&D) expenditure. Contrary to expectations, profit growth seems to have little detectable...

In this article, we construct an innovation scoreboard based on a conceptually acceptable endogenous indicator which is shown to be the output caused by the innovation generating process. A balanced panel of data on 552 UK firms over the period 1994-2005 is used to test for causality using...

The aim of this paper is an investigation on the role of demand upon innovation. Despite the decades-long debate on demand and innovation, theory still lacks an analytical formulation. This paper proposes a model where demand is conceived as a peculiar blend of two conditions, market size, and...

The aim of this paper is to identify the determinants of Research and development (R&D) investment in French firms. For analysis of covariate effects on R&D expenditures, a two-part model that combines a probit regression on the decision to perform R&D and a linear regression on log-positive...

Science and engineering skills as well as management and leadership skills are often referred to as sources of innovative activities within companies. Broken down into sectoral innovation patterns, this article examines the role of formal education, actual occupation and work experience in the...