Essays on the Impacts of Technology Development and R&D Subsidies

Jyrki Ali-Yrkkö

No 43 in ETLA A from The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy

Abstract: This thesis studies the impacts of technology development and R&D subsidies. The first essay examines whether public and private R&D funding are substitutes or complements. Particular attention is paid to capital market imperfections by examining what kind of effect financial constraint has on the relationship between public and private funded R&D. According to empirical analyses, public R&D funding does not crowd out privately financed R&D. Instead, the results suggest that receiving a positive decision regarding public R&D funding increases privately funded R&D. The second essay analyses how public R&D financing impacts the labour demand of companies. Empirical results suggest that public R&D financing increases both group-level and domestic R&D employment. However, public funding does not have a statistically significant effect on non-R&D employment. The third essay focuses on the productivity effects of R&D. The results of empirical analyses are two-fold. In the short run (in 1-2 years), no statistically significant productivity impact of R&D is found. However, R&D does have an economically and statistically significant impact when R&D efforts made 3-5 years earlier are taken into account. Hence, a window of almost 5 years is needed to capture the productivity impact of R&D. The fourth essay studies how patent quality impacts the likelihood of a merger or acquisition. To proxy the quality of patents, both forward and backward citations are used. Multinomial logit estimations show that owning patents correlates with becoming a target for a foreign company. The same does not apply to targets for domestic firms. However, the results also indicate that the quality of patents does not have a statistically significant impact on the likelihood of becoming target for a domestic or foreign company.

Keywords: research and development; public support; subsidy; impact; productivity; patent; acquisition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: Written 2008
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