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on Innovation |
| By: | G. Jacob Blackwood; Cindy Cunningham; Matthew Dey; Lucia S. Foster; Cheryl Grim; John C. Haltiwanger; Rachel L. Nesbit; Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia; Jay Stewart; Cody Tuttle; Zoltan Wolf |
| Abstract: | An important gap in most empirical studies of establishment-level productivity is the limited information about workers’ characteristics and their tasks. Skill-adjusted labor input measures have been shown to be important for aggregate productivity measurement. Moreover, the theoretical literature on differences in production technologies across businesses increasingly emphasizes the task content of production. Our ultimate objective is to open this black box of tasks and skills at the establishment-level by combining establishment-level data on occupations from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) with a restricted-access establishment-level productivity dataset created by the BLS-Census Bureau Collaborative Micro-productivity Project. We take a first step toward this objective by exploring the conceptual, specification, and measurement issues to be confronted. We provide suggestive empirical analysis of the relationship between within-industry dispersion in productivity and tasks and skills. We find that within-industry productivity dispersion is strongly positively related to within-industry task/skill dispersion. |
| JEL: | C81 E23 O33 |
| Date: | 2022–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30620&r=ino |
| By: | Bertschek, Irene; Block, Jörn; Kritikos, Alexander; Stiel, Caroline |
| Abstract: | In response to strong revenue and income losses that a large share of the self-employed faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, the German federal government introduced a €50bn emergency aid program. Based on real-time online-survey data comprising more than 20,000 observations, we analyze the impact of this program on the subjective survival probability. In particular, we investigate how the digitalization level of the self-employed influences the program's effectiveness. Employing propensity score matching, we find that the emergency aid program had only moderately positive effects on the confidence of the self-employed to survive the crisis. However, the self-employed whose businesses were highly digitalized, benefitted much more from the state aid compared to those whose businesses were less digitalized. This holds true only for those self-employed in advanced digitalization stages, who started the digitalization processes already before the crisis. Moreover, taking a regional perspective, we find suggestive evidence that the quality of the regional broadband infrastructure matters in the sense that it increases the effectiveness of the emergency aid program. Our findings show the interplay between governmental support programs, the digitalization levels of entrepreneurs, and the regional digital infrastructure. The study helps public policy to increase the impact of crisis-related policy instruments. |
| Keywords: | Self-Employment,Emergency Aid,Treatment Effects,COVID-19,Entrepreneurship,Digitalization,Resilience |
| JEL: | C14 H43 L25 L26 J68 O33 |
| Date: | 2022 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:zewdip:22045&r=ino |
| By: | Arianna Martinelli; Julia Mazzei |
| Abstract: | Increasing evidence indicates that a large share of granted patents are ''undeserved'' because they do not meet the criteria of novelty or non-obviousness. In recent decades, many jurisdictions introduced patent reforms to avoid weak patent applications and improve legal patent quality. In particular, the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA), enacted into law in 2011, introduced the post-grant validity challenge at the United States Patents and Trademarks Office (USPTO). This procedure allows any third party to question granted patents, possibly leading to patent revocation or scope reduction. This paper aims to provide evidence of the impact of such policy change on the legal quality of the patent system. To identify the policy effect we exploit the fact that the same invention is patented in different legislation and that not all of them have post-grant review procedures. In particular, we compare the same patent filed at the USPTO and the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO). In this setting, we apply standard Diff-in-Diff analysis to estimate the effect of the post-grant validity challenge on the patent scope. Our results indicate that the AIA reform contributed to a reduction of U.S. patent scope in the last decade, indeed increasing the legal quality of the patent system. |
| Keywords: | Patent opposition; patent quality; policy evaluation; patent scope. |
| Date: | 2022–11–16 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ssa:lemwps:2022/34&r=ino |
| By: | Silje Haus-Reve; Rune Dahl Fitjar; Andres Rodriguez-Pose; |
| Abstract: | Implicitly or explicitly, much innovation policy treats investments in research and development (R&D) as the main input to innovation. A large body of literature in innovation studies has challenged this, highlighting the role of external sources of innovation and of innovation based on learning by doing, using and interacting (DUI). Nonetheless, there has been limited empirical research on how firm-internal activities to promote DUI affect innovation, and on how important such activities are relative to internal R&D and to external sources of knowledge. We also know little about how internal DUI activities interact with internal R&D and with external knowledge sourcing. We address these gaps using Norwegian Community Innovation Survey data from 2010. We find that internal DUI is an important driver of new-to-market product innovation. Further, the results show partial substitution effects between internal DUI and internal R&D, as well as between internal DUI and external DUI. |
| Keywords: | Innovation; Experience-based knowledge; STI; DUI; Firms |
| Date: | 2022–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:egu:wpaper:2222&r=ino |
| By: | Blind, Knut; Niebel, Crispin Miles; Rammer, Christian |
| Abstract: | In May 2018, a new regulation by the European Commission on data protection came into force, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It requires many firms to update their data protection strategy. It may also complicate different types of data usage, particularly related to data on individuals. In the literature, there is little evidence and no consensus on whether this new privacy regulation is beneficial or detrimental to innovation. This study provides empirical evidence on the impact of the GDPR on innovation activities in firms. Exploiting panel data from the German innovation survey, a difference-in-difference analysis shows that the GDPR stimulated additional innovation activity while shifting the focus of innovation away from radical and towards more incremental innovation. This holds for both firms that report that the GDPR complicated their innovation efforts, and for the much smaller group of firms that report that the GDPR facilitated their innovation activities. Finally, larger and older firms experience higher increases in their turnover with incremental innovation compared to smaller and younger firms. |
| Keywords: | General Data Protection Regulation,Innovation,Community Innovation Survey,Difference-in-difference estimation |
| JEL: | O31 O38 C22 L51 |
| Date: | 2022 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:zewdip:22047&r=ino |
| By: | Nelson Lind; Natalia Ramondo |
| Abstract: | We study the global innovation and diffusion of ideas by introducing trade into the model in Eaton and Kortum (1999) (EK). This extension allows us to use international trade flows and country-level factor costs to estimate both the intensity of innovation within countries over time and diffusion rates across countries. We find significant specialization across the globe: some countries have high innovation rates, while other countries rely on diffusion. Although innovation is correlated with economic growth, there are many high income countries that primarily produce using diffused ideas. Additionally, these patterns shift over time — we estimate that a wave of innovation began in China during the early-2000’s, reducing its reliance on diffused technology. |
| JEL: | F1 O3 O4 |
| Date: | 2022–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30590&r=ino |
| By: | Hussingera, Katrin; Issahd, Wunnam |
| Abstract: | Family firms are known for their reluctance to invest in research and development. We show that strengthened trade secret protection is associated with higher R&D investment by family firms. More specifically, we show that the association between the strength of trade secret protection through the U.S. Uniform Trade Secrets Act and R&D investment is positively moderated by family control. Our results further show that the positive moderation of family control on the association between the strength of trade secret protection and R&D investment varies with the industry context, being stronger in high tech industries and weaker in discrete product industries. |
| Keywords: | Family firms,intellectual property protection,trade secret protection,UTSA,R&Dinvestment,socioemotional wealth |
| JEL: | O34 O32 G32 M14 |
| Date: | 2022 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:zewdip:22039&r=ino |
| By: | Florenta Teodoridis; Jino Lu; Jeffrey L. Furman |
| Abstract: | Understanding factors affecting the direction of innovation is a central aim of research in the economics of innovation. Progress on this topic has been inhibited by difficulties in measuring distance and movement in knowledge space. We describe a methodology that infers the mapping of the knowledge landscape based on text documents. The approach is based on an unassisted machine learning technique, Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP), which flexibly identifies patterns in text corpora. The resulting mapping of the knowledge landscape enables calculations of distance and movement, measures that are valuable in several contexts for research in innovation. We benchmark and demonstrate the benefits of this approach in the context of 44 years of USPTO data. |
| JEL: | C55 C80 O3 O31 O32 |
| Date: | 2022–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30603&r=ino |
| By: | De Haas, Ralph (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, CEPR and KU Leuven); Sterk, Vincent (University College London and CEPR); Van Horen, Neeltje (Bank of England) |
| Abstract: | Can policymakers improve macroeconomic performance by encouraging the entry of high‑performance start‑ups? To answer this question, we construct a novel and comprehensive data set on 1.3 million start‑ups in 10 European countries. We apply cluster analysis to identify distinct start‑up types and trace their development over time. Three stylised facts transpire. First, we uncover five well‑separated start‑up types that are consistently present across countries, industries, and cohorts. We label these basic, large, capital‑intensive, cash‑intensive, and high‑leverage. Second, the initial differences between these start‑up types are persistent. Third, each start‑up type displays a characteristic life cycle in terms of productivity, employment generation, and exit rates. We feed these empirical results into an agnostic firm dynamics model to quantify how much structural policy could improve macroeconomic performance by shifting the composition of start‑ups. We find that substantial gains in aggregate employment and productivity can be made through policies that benefit high‑performance start‑ups (such as large and capital‑intensive ones) while discouraging the entry of underperforming firms (such as highly leveraged ones). |
| Keywords: | Start‑ups; firm entry; productivity; corporate tax; entrepreneurship; cluster analysis. |
| JEL: | D22 D24 G32 L11 L25 L26 O47 |
| Date: | 2022–06–17 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:boe:boeewp:0986&r=ino |
| By: | Runst, Petrik; Thomä, Jörg |
| Abstract: | Personality is a key driver of self-employment decisions. For this reason, the personality traits of entrepreneurs or business owners have been repeatedly studied in previous research. This paper extends this literature by focusing on the craft entrepreneur - as a classic form of strategic entrepreneurship. Based on a large, representative German household panel data set, we show that the entrepreneurial type mediates the effect of broad (Big Five) and narrow personality traits (locus of control, risk tolerance) on the likelihood of being self-employed. Our results support the conventional distinction between craft entrepreneurs from other types of entrepreneurship. The paper concludes with implications for policy and research. |
| Keywords: | Entrepreneurship,Craft entrepreneur,Self-employment,Big Five,Personality |
| JEL: | D91 L26 M13 M21 |
| Date: | 2022 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:ifhwps:382022&r=ino |