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on Technology and Industrial Dynamics |
| By: | YAMASHITA Nobuaki; YAMAUCHI Isamu |
| Abstract: | There has been a global shift in the distribution of manufacturing jobs and activities away from high-wage countries to low-wage countries for the past few decades. This paper examines a largely unexplored channel of the effects of offshore production on onshore (domestic) innovation performance. Controlling for the endogeneity, we find that increased offshore employment and R&D do not have positive impact on the domestic innovation measured by the number of patent applications and the number of forward citations on average. However, offshore R&D increases the quality of domestic innovation when the firms expand R&D function to the developed countries while it has a negative effect in the developing countries. We also find a synergistic effect between production and R&D activities. Therefore, separating the two activities can decrease the efficiency of resource allocation on the domestic innovation. |
| Date: | 2019–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eti:dpaper:19068&r=all |
| By: | Eberle, Jonathan; Böing, Philipp |
| Abstract: | We investigate the impact of research and development (R&D) subsidies on R&D inputs of large- and medium-sized firms and on additional innovation and economic activities in Chinese provinces. A panel vector autoregressive (VAR) model and corresponding impulse response function (IRF) analysis allow us to differentiate between direct and indirect effects, which add up to total effects. We find that an increase of R&D subsidies significantly decreases private R&D investments, although there is a significant positive effect on the R&D personnel employed in firms. We interpret these findings as a partial crowding-out effect because public funds substitute some private funds while total R&D inputs still increase. Complementarily, we find a positive secondary effect on the provincial patent activity, our measure of technological progress. Interestingly, we also find potentially unintended effects of R&D subsidies on increases in the investment rate in physical capital and residential buildings. Although R&D subsidies fail to incentivise private R&D expenditures, firms increase total R&D inputs, and provincial economies benefit from secondary effects on technological progress and capital deepening. |
| Keywords: | China,R&D subsidies,regional economic development,panel VAR,impulse response function |
| JEL: | C33 R11 R58 O38 O47 |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:zewdip:19038&r=all |
| By: | Timothy DESTEFANO; HANEDA Sho; KWON Hyeog Ug |
| Abstract: | The following paper examines the determinants of structural adjustment in Japan. Unlike many other developed economies, firms in Japan rely more on changes to employment composition than mass layoffs as a method of structural change. Examining the drivers of changes in employee composition in Japan is therefore of interest to policy makers and academics alike. This research uses a novel plant-level dataset, which contains considerable detail on the types of employees used by Japanese manufacturers between 2001 and 2014. The results find a number of countervailing factors that explain the use of certain employment types. Growth in the diffusion of robotics is linked to the use of fewer non-regular employees. This appears to be partially driven by the fact that these machines positively predict the dismissal of certain types of non-regular workers. Offshoring from Japan leads to the use of a higher proportion of non-regular to regular workers, potentially due to increased competition faced by plants from abroad. Plant productivity however leads to the use of more regular to non-regular workers. Finally, establishments which experienced job dismissals in the past are substituting away from regular to non-regular workers in the present. |
| Date: | 2019–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eti:dpaper:19067&r=all |
| By: | Hao Wei (Department of International Economics, Beijing Normal University); Ran Yuan (Department of International Economics, Beijing Normal University); Laixun Zhao (Research Institute for Economics & Business Administration (RIEB), Kobe University, Japan) |
| Abstract: | Using firm-level R&D data with regional international talent data, we find that international talent increases the R&D investment of Chinese manufacturing firms, a result that is further confirmed with patent data and under a number of robustness checks. These findings stem from two mechanisms: international talent boosts human capital accumulation and provides a diversified labor force. Further, the R&D promoting effect is stronger if firms are located in eastern China rather than in other regions, of small and medium-sized rather than large-sized, of domestic ownership rather than foreign ownership. The policy implication is, the introduction of international talent can be a new way to promoting R&D investment, especially for skilled-labor constrained countries. |
| Keywords: | International talent inflow, Manufacturing firms, R&D, Patent application |
| JEL: | F16 F22 O32 |
| Date: | 2019–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:kob:dpaper:dp2019-17&r=all |
| By: | Zsofia Barany (Sciences Po, Paris); Christian Siegel (University of Kent) |
| Abstract: | We study the origins of labor productivity growth and its differences across sectors. In our model, sectors employ workers of different occupations and various forms of capital, none of which are perfect substitutes, and technology evolves at the sector-factor cell level. Using the model we infer technologies from US data over 1960-2017. We find sector-specific routine labor augmenting technological change to be crucial. It is the most important driver of sectoral differences, and has a large and increasing contribution to aggregate labor productivity growth. Neither capital accumulation nor the occupational employment structure within sectors explains much of the sectoral differences. |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:red:sed019:872&r=all |
| By: | Crystal, Michael; Gandal, Neil; Shilony, Royee; Shur-Ofry, Michal |
| Abstract: | Scientific understanding of innovation processes and of the patent system increasingly relies on big data analyses of patent citations. Much of that research focuses on highly cited patents. This study, conversely, offers the first systematic exploration of uncited patents-patents that receive no citations. Analyzing data on all US patents issued between 1976 and 2008, we focus on the ratio of uncited patents out of all patents granted each year. We track the changes in the percentage of uncited patents during that period, and across technological fields, controlling for patents' age. We also investigate traits of uncited patents by examining the association between lack of citations and various factors including the number of inventors, number of technological subclasses, number of backward citations, and number of claims in the patent. We find a robust pattern whereby the percentage of uncited patents declined between 1976 and the mid 1990s, but has been significantly increasing since then. These findings are consistent across technological fields and hold after controlling for patent characteristics. We discuss these and additional findings, and propose possible explanations. We suggest that the trend of increase in uncited patents raises, and reinforces, concerns regarding patent quality and "patent explosion". More broadly, our focus on "negative information" embedded in patent data opens up a new avenue for further research that can deepen our understanding of the patent system. |
| Keywords: | Big Data; Innovation; Negative Knowledge; networks; Patent Citations; Uncited Patents |
| Date: | 2019–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:13982&r=all |
| By: | Moretti, Enrico |
| Abstract: | The high-tech sector is increasingly concentrated in a small number of expensive cities, with the top ten cities in "Computer Science", "Semiconductors" and "Biology and Chemistry", accounting for 70%, 79% and 59% of inventors, respectively. Why do inventors tend to locate near other inventors in the same field, despite the higher costs? I use longitudinal data on top inventors based on the universe of US patents 1971 - 2007 to quantify the productivity advantages of Silicon-Valley style clusters and their implications for the overall production of patents in the US. I relate the number of patents produced by an inventor in a year to the size of the local cluster, defined as a city * research field * year. I first study the experience of Rochester NY, whose high-tech cluster declined due to the demise of its main employer, Kodak. Due to the growth of digital photography, Kodak employment collapsed after 1996, resulting in a 49.2% decline in the size of the Rochester high-tech cluster. I test whether the change in cluster size affected the productivity of inventors outside Kodak and the photography sector. I find that between 1996 and 2007 the productivity of non-Kodak inventors in Rochester declined by 20.6% relative to inventors in other cities, conditional on inventor fixed effects. In the second part of the paper, I turn to estimates based on all the data in the sample. I find that when an inventor moves to a larger cluster she experiences significant increases in the number of patents produced and the number of citations received. Conditional on inventor, firm, and city * year effects, the elasticity of number of patents produced with respect to cluster size is 0.0662 (0.0138). The productivity increase follows the move and there is no evidence of pre-trends. IV estimates based on the geographical structure of firms with laboratories in multiple cities are statistically similar to OLS estimates. In the final part of the paper, I use the estimated elasticity of productivity with respect to cluster size to quantify the aggregate effects of geographical agglomeration on the overall production of patents in the US. I find macroeconomic benefits of clustering for the US as a whole. In a counterfactual scenario where the quality of U.S. inventors is held constant but their geographical location is changed so that all cities have the same number of inventors in each field, inventor productivity would increase in small clusters and decline in large clusters. On net, the overall number of patents produced in the US in a year would be 11.07% smaller. |
| Date: | 2019–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:13992&r=all |
| By: | Ejermo, Olof (Lund University); Fassio, Claudio (Lund University); Källström, John (Lund University) |
| Abstract: | Using a highly comprehensive new dataset on Swedish researchers, we investigate the effects of interuniversity mobility on researcher productivity. Our study suggests substantial gains from mobility on scientific output. We find that mobility induces a long-lasting increase in a researcher’s publications by 29% and citations by 50%. Moreover, we analyze the factors that are likely to have an impact on the overall effect of mobility: the interaction of mobility and promotion, the importance of the status of the destination university, as well as the role of the specific disciplinary field of mobile researchers. The empirical analysis addresses selection using inverse probability treatment censoring weights. |
| Keywords: | Economics of science; mobility; scientific productivity; university |
| JEL: | I23 J24 O31 |
| Date: | 2019–10–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:lucirc:2019_014&r=all |