This paper aims to show how firms account for expenditure on their intangible investments and how this influences their decision making processes. Evidence from our survey of 614 large Australian companies show that (1) firms do not systematically identify and separate expenditures on intangible...

Recent years have seen a growth in the literature on a variety of aspects of intangible investment, the complement of the more familiar investment in tangible assets such as buildings, plant, and equipment. For economic and business analysts this change in emphasis necessitates the selection of...

We use data from 3000 academic scientists to estimate the effects of other parties’ patents on the academics’ research. Nearly half of all scientists report that their choice of research projects has been affected by the presence of other parties’ patents. We find that transaction costs...

Scant discussion exists in the literature about the relative design merits of various R&D schemes and most authors treat program design as a black box. In this paper, we assess the design features of three major forms of R&D support: entitlement schemes, competitive schemes and industry R&D...

Patents may assist trade in technology either by protecting buyers against the expropriation of the idea by third parties (the appropriation effect) or by enabling sellers to more frankly disclose the idea during the negotiation phase (the disclosure effect). We test for the presence of both...

Two parallel streams of research investigating the determinants of corporate R&D exist: one from economics and the other from management. The economists' variables tend to reflect the firm's external environment while the explanatory variables used by management scientists are commonly internal...

In this paper, we take another look at the role that patents play in determining successful commercialization. We address this issue using survey data on 3,736 Australian inventions which were the subject of a patent application between 1986 and 2005. Although almost half of the survey...

The commercialization of inventions is an investment, similar to spending on plant and equipment, and accordingly we would expect it to be affected by macroeconomic conditions. Using data on the commercialization activity from over 4000 inventors, we find evidence that macroeconomic conditions...

One of the major emerging macroeconomic problems during the century has been the tendency for inflation to accelerate under prolonged periods of full employment. According to Isaac (1977) and Kaldor (1996, 5th Lecture), this arises from the process of wage determination common to most western...

This paper describes two dimensions of the international patenting process: application outcomes and pendency periods using matched samples of patent applications filed at the Australian Patent Office (APO), the Japanese Patent Office (JPO), the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)...