Responses from the Yale University survey of 650 research and development executives were linked to U.S. trade statistics at the four-digit SIC level for the years 1965-85 to test several hypotheses concerning intra-industry trade. A new index of intra-industry trade was developed to capture both the level and balance dimensions of import and export flows. Intra-industry trade is found to be more extensive, the higher industry R&D/sales ratios were, the more important economies of learning-by-doing were, and greater the relevance of academic engineering research was, and the more niche-filling strategies were emphasized in new product development. When firms oriented their R&D efforts toward meeting the specialized demands of individual customers, intra-industry trade was lower. The highest levels of intra-industry trade were found in loosely oligopolistic industries.
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R&D Reactions To High-Technology Import Competition
March 1991
Working Paper Number:
CES-91-02
For a seventeen-year panel covering 308 U.S. manufacturing corporations, we analyze firms' R&D spending reactions to changes in high-technology imports. On average, companies reduced their R&D/sales ratios in the short run as imports rose. Individual company reactions were heterogeneous, especially for multinational firms. Short-run reactions were more aggressive (i.e., tending toward R&D/sales ratio increases), the more concentrated the markets were in which the companies operated, the larger the company was, and the more diversified the firm's sales mix was. Reactions were less aggressive when special trade barriers had been erected or patent protection was strong in the impacted industries. Companies with a top executive officer educated in science or engineering were more likely to increase R&D/sales ratios in response to an import shock, all else equal. Over the full 17-year sample period, reactions may have shifted toward greater average aggressiveness.
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INTRA-FIRM TRADE AND PRODUCT CONTRACTIBILITY
March 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-12
This paper examines the determinants of intra-firm trade in U.S. imports using detailed country-product data. We create a new measure of product contractibility based on the degree of intermediation in international trade for the product. We find important roles for the interaction of country and product characteristics in determining intra-firm trade shares. Intra- firm trade is high for products with low levels of contractibility sourced from countries with weak governance, for skill-intensive products from skill-scarce countries, and for capital-intensive products from capital-abundant countries.
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A Portrait of Firms that Invest in R&D
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-41
We focus on the evolution and behavior of firms that invest in research and development (R&D). We build upon the cross-sectional analysis in Foster and Grim (2010) that identified the characteristics of top R&D spending firms and follow up by charting the behavior of these firms over time. Our focus is dynamic in nature as we merge micro-level cross-sectional data from the Survey of Industrial Research and Development (SIRD) and the Business Research & Development and Innovation Survey (BRDIS) with the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD). The result is a panel firm-level data set from 1992 to 2011 that tracks firms' performances as they enter and exit the R&D surveys. Using R&D expenditures to proxy R&D performance, we find the top R&D performing firms in the U.S. across all years to be large, old, multinational enterprises. However, we also find that the composition of R&D performing firms is gradually shifting more towards smaller domestic firms with expenditures being less sensitive to scale effects. We find a high degree of persistence for these firms over time. We chart the history of R&D performing firms and compare them to all firms in the economy and find substantial differences in terms of age, size, firm structure and international activity; these differences persist when looking at future firm outcomes.
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Innovation and Appropriability: Revisiting the Role of Intellectual Property
March 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-09
It is more than 25 years since the authors of the Yale and Carnegie surveys studied how firms seek to protect the rents from innovation. In this paper, we revisit that question using a nationally representative sample of firms over the period 2008-2015, with the goal of updating and extending a set of stylized facts that has been influential for our understanding of the economics of innovation. There are five main findings. First, while patenting firms are relatively uncommon in the economy, they account for an overwhelming share of R&D spending. Second, utility patents are considered less important than other forms of IP protection, like trade secrets, trademarks, and copyrights. Third, industry differences explain a great deal of the level of firms' engagement with IP, with high-tech firms on average being more active on all forms of IP. Fourth, we do not find any significant difference in the use of IP strategies across firms at different points of their life cycle. Lastly, unlike age, firms of different size appear to manage IP significantly differently. On average, larger firms tend to engage much more extensively in the protection of IP, and this pattern cannot be easily explained by differences in the type of R&D or innovation produced by a firm. We also discuss the implications of these findings for innovation research and policy.
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Science, R&D, And Invention Potential Recharge: U.S. Evidence
January 1993
Working Paper Number:
CES-93-02
The influence of academic science on industrial R&D seems to have increased in recent years compared with the pre-World War II period. This paper outlines an approach to tracing this influence using a panel of 14 R&D performing industries from 1961-1986. The results indicate an elasticity between real R&D and indicators of stocks of academic science of about 0.6. This elasticity is significant controlling for industry effects. However, the elasticity declines from its level during the 1961-1973 subperiod, when it was 2.2, to 0.5 during the 1974-1986 subperiod. Reasons for the decline include exogenous and endogenous exhaustion of invention potential, and declining incentives to do R&D stemming from a weakening of intellectual property rights. The growth of R&D since the mid-1980s suggests a restoration of R&D incentives in still more recent times.
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A General Inter-Industry Relatedness Index
December 2006
Working Paper Number:
CES-06-31
Firm growth and expansion is widely believed to be guided by the desire to leverage existing resources. But which resources? The answer depends largely on context.the peculiarities of industries, firms, technologies, production, customers, and a host of other dimensions. This fact makes pointing to any particular set of resources as the source of expansion decisions potentially problematic and makes more difficult tests of theories such as the resource-based view of the firm. This paper tackles the problem by developing a general inter-industry relatedness index that can be usefully applied across industry and firm contexts. The index harnesses the relatedness information embedded in the multi-product organization and diversification decisions of every firm in the US manufacturing economy. The index is general in that it implicitly varies the underlying resources upon which expansion proceeds with the industries in question and provides a percentile relatedness rank for every possible pair of fourdigit SIC manufacturing industries. The general index is tested for predictive validity and found to perform as expected. Applications of the index in strategy research are suggested.
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Measuring Total Factor Productivity, Technical Change And The Rate Of Returns To Research And Development
May 1991
Working Paper Number:
CES-91-03
Recent research indicates that estimates of the effect of research and development (R&D) on total factor productivity growth are sensitive to different measures of total factor productivity. In this paper, we use establishment level data for the flat glass industry extracted from the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Research Database (LRD) to construct three competing measures of total factor productivity. We then use these measures to estimate the conventional R&D intensity model. Our empirical results support previous finding that the estimated coefficients of the model are sensitive to the measurement of total factor productivity. Also, when using microdata and more detailed modeling, R&D is found to be a significant factor influencing productivity growth. Finally, for the flat glass industry, a specific technical change index capturing the learning-by-doing process appears to be superior to the conventional time trend index.
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Learning By Doing And Competition In The Early Rayon Industry
February 1993
Working Paper Number:
CES-93-04
In this paper, I derive a structural econometric model of learning by doing from a dynamic oligopoly game. Unlike previous empirical models, this model is capable of testing hypotheses concerning both the technological nature and behavioral implications of learning. I estimate the model with firm level data from the early U.S. rayon industry. The empirical results show that there were considerable differences across firms in both proprietary and spillover learning. The results also indicate that two of the three firms took their rival's reactions into account when choosing their strategies.
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THE INFLUENCES OF FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENTS, INTRAFIRM TRADING, AND CURRENCY UNDERVALUATION ON U.S. FIRM TRADE DISPUTES
January 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-04
We use the case of a puzzling decline in U.S. firm antidumping (AD) filings to explore how firm-level economic heterogeneity within U.S. industries influences political and regulatory responses to changes in the global economy. Firms exhibit heterogeneity both within and across industries regarding foreign direct investment. We propose that firms making vertical, or resource-seeking, investments abroad will be less likely to file AD petitions. Hence, we argue, the increasing vertical FDI of U.S. firms (particularly in countries with undervalued currencies) makes trade disputes far less likely. We use firm level data to examine the universe of U.S. manufacturing firms and find that AD filers generally conduct no intrafirm trade with filed-against countries. Among U.S. MNCs, the number of AD filings is negatively associated with increases in the level of intrafirm trade for large firms. In the context of currency undervaluation, we confirm the existing finding that undervaluation is associated with more AD filings. We also find, however, that high levels of related-party imports from countries with undervalued currencies significantly decrease the numbers of AD filings. Our study highlights the centrality of global production networks in understanding political mobilization over international economic policy. [192]
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