Keeping up with rapid technological change necessitates constant innovation. Successful innovation depends on both incumbent workers’ knowledge, based on experience, and knowledge about the latest technologies, along with the skills needed to implement them. Both of these knowledge-based...

In this paper we examine the importance of financial and other obstacles to innovation in the Netherlands using statistical information from the CIS 3.5 innovation survey. We report results on the effect of these obstacles on the firms’ decision to abandon, prematurely stop, seriously slow...

We analyse how a patent-holding pharmaceutical firm may strategically use advertising of existing drugs to affect R&D investments in new (differentiated) drugs, and thereby affect the probability distribution of future market structures in the industry. Within a fairly generalmodel framework, we...

We study the effects of employment protection taking into account that firms can invest in R&D or buy new technologies in order to restore their productivity. To do so we develop an equilibrium matching model with an imperfect labor and innovation market. If employment protection is introduced,...

In this paper, we offer a novel explanation to the surge in patenting bserved during the last years. With low patentability standards at PTOs (Patent and Trademark Offices awarding so-called bad patents), not only “false innovators” have the chance of being granted patents but also, and more...

To what extent does a tax credit affect firms’ R&D activity? What are the mechanisms? This paper examines the effect of R&D tax credits on firms’ R&D expenditure by exploiting the variation across firms in the changes in the eligible tax credit rate between 2000 and 2003. Estimating the...

We study innovation contests with asymmetric information and identical contestants, where contestants’ efforts and innate abilities generate inventions of varying qualities. The designer offers a reward to the contestant achieving the highest quality and receives the revenue generated by the...

We show the effects of the bargaining power of labour unions on product innovation under decentralised and centralised wage bargaining. In this context, we show the implications of preference function, which affects the market size. A higher union bargaining power increases innovation if...

What is the social value of innovations in Schumpeterian growth models? This issue is tackled by introducing the concept of Lindahl equilibrium in a standard endogenous growth model with vertical innovations which is extended by explicitly considering knowledge diffusion on a Salop (1979)...

This paper asks whether adversity spurs the introduction of process innovations and increases the use of managerial incentives by firms. Using a large panel data set of workplaces in Canada, our identification strategy relies on exogenous variation in adversity arising from increased border...