During the last years, the renewable energy strategy of the European Union (EU) and the proposed policies and regulations, namely the Renewable Energy Directive (RED), have been heavily discussed among scientific circles and various interest groups. The sustainability of different biofuels and...

We analyze the spatial diffusion of knowledge in laser technology in West Germany from 1960, when this technology began, until 2005. Laser technology research has been nearly exclusively conducted in regions that are home to a university with a physics or electrical engineering department, an...

This paper extends the existing literature on strategic R&D alliances by presenting a model of innovation networks with endogenous absorptive capacity. The networks emerge as a result of bilateral cooperation over time between firms occupying different locations in the knowledge space. Social...

Cooperation can benefit and hurt firms at the same time. An important question then is: when is it better to cooperate. And how can an appropriate partner be selected? In this paper we present a model of inter-firm cooperation driven by cognitive distance, appropriability conditions and external...

Previous studies of organizations have highlighted that leadership and organizational performance have a strong and long-term impact on employee behavior in private firms. In this study, we analyze whether similar effects can also be observed in academia by examining the commercialization...

The economic literature started to recognize the heterogeneity characterizing the nature of different technologies, introducing the concept of General Purpose Technologies. In this paper, we offer a "new view of General Purpose Technologies", building on the historical as well as on the recent...

This paper analyzes whether firms conducting internal R&D and acquiring external high-tech equipment experience a complementarity effect. For German CIS data we conduct a complete set of indirect and direct complementarity tests refining the analysis by looking at various types of innovations...

In this paper we are studying a multiple player two-armed bandit model with two risky arms in discrete time. Players have to find the superior arm and can learn from others' history of choices and successes. In equilibrium, there is no con?ict between individual and social rationality. If agents...

In this study we investigate the factors that shape the attitudes of scientists toward starting their own business or working in a private sector firm. The analysis is based on data collected from scientists working in the German Max Planck Society, a research institution devoted to basic...

The literature on knowledge spillovers offers substantial evidence that workers, as main carriers of knowledge, play a role in the diffusion of knowledge among firms. One of the channels through which knowledge is diffused is the job-to-job mobility of workers. The purpose of this study is to...