This Paper empirically investigates two important determinants of international activity through wholly owned operations, joint-ventures and licensing, namely country risk and IPRs protection. Using a comprehensive database on investments in chemical plants during the period 1981-96, we show...

This Paper presents an econometric analysis of firm and industry characteristics conducive to cooperation with universities, using Community Innovation Survey data for Belgium. We find that large firms are more likely to have cooperative agreements with universities. These agreements are formed...

A large portion of innovators do not patent their inventions. This is a relative puzzle since innovators are often perceived to be at the mercy of imitators in the absence of legal protection. In practice, innovators however invest actively in making their products technologically hard to...

This paper investigates the choice of a licensing mechanism by the holder of a patent whose validity is uncertain. We provide sufficient conditions of a general nature under which the licensor prefers to use a per-unit royalty contract. In particular we show that this is the case for the holders...

Nowadays the wealth of nations depends to the largest extent on their technological capabilities. The paper analyses how the role of certain groups of countries changes with respect to these capabilities. Empirical study shows that the further domination of the Triad countries in the development...

We study the effect of a firm winning an additional H-1B visa on the firm’s outcomes, by comparing winning and losing firms in the Fiscal Year 2006 and 2007 H-1B visa lotteries. We match administrative data on the participants in these lotteries to the universe of approved U.S. patents, and to...

The pace of innovation is related both to the level of investment in innovation and the pool of knowledge from which innovators can draw. Both of these are endogenous: Investments in innovations are affected by the pool of knowledge and the ability of firms to appropriate the returns to their...

This paper examines the use of innovation protection mechanisms in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). By starting from a knowledge-based view the aim is to achieve a better understanding of how the role perceived by innovating SMEs of patent protection and the long-term retention of qualified...

The paper provides detailed evidence on technology transfer offices (TTOs) in Italian universities by analyzing a large and original university-level database built by Netval for the 2002-2010 period and providing updated empirical results on the three main channels of research valorization: (i)...