We analyze the effect of the Öresund Bridge, a combined railway and motorway bridge between Swedish Malmö and the Danish capital Copenhagen, on inventive activity in the region of Malmö. Applying difference-in-difference estimation on individual-level data, our findings suggest that the...

Innovation activities in the German enterprise sector showed two opposing trends over the past two decades: While total innovation expenditures grew substantially, the number of firms conducting innovation activities fell sharply. Innovation expenditures hence concentrate on fewer firms. In this...

Among available policy levers to boost innovation, investment in applied research organisations has received little empirical attention. In this paper, we analyse the case of the Fraunhofer Society, the largest public applied research organization in Germany. We analyse whether project...

Previous research has expressed concerns about firms engaging less in basic research. We contribute to this debate by studying trends in the scientific publishing activities of firms located in Germany. Our results do not confirm a declining trend in raw numbers with numbers indicating that...

In this paper we analyze the conditions under which firms decide to offshore innovation. We consider the role of internal technological capabilities and technological dynamism in the firm environment, distinguishing speed and uncertainty of technological change. Using unique data from the German...

In October 2013, the European Commission presented a new indicator intended to capture innovation outputs and outcomes and thereby "support policy-makers in establishing new or reinforced actions to remove bottlenecks that prevent innovators from translating ideas into products and services that...

How do intellectual property rights influence academic science? We investigate the consequences of the introduction of software patents in the U.S. on the publications of university researchers in the field of computer science. Difference-in-difference estimations reveal that software scientists...

This paper shows that the American Inventor's Protection Act, which introduced the disclosure of patent applications after 18 months, i.e. before a grant decision is taken and, hence, before it is known whether the respective technology receives legal protection, is associated with a reduction...

How important is Google for scientific research? This paper exploits the exogenous shock represented by Google's sudden withdrawal of its services from mainland China to assess the importance of access to information for the knowledge production function of scientific scholars in the field of...

Open standard-setting organizations (SSOs) have emerged as important coordination and diffusion mechanism for information and communication technologies. Open standards are developed non-discriminatorily and licensed to anybody at reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. Little is known about...