Because China has become one of the largest applicants of PCT patents, it is of interest to compare the quality of Chinese and non-Chinese applications. We extend a quality index based on internationally comparable citation data from international search reports (ISR) to consider foreign,...

The U.S. and EU Merger Guidelines strongly emphasize the relevance of the “ease of entry” argument in merger evaluations. Up to now, very little is known empirically about how mergers affect entry and exit, and the resulting number of firms in the markets. We empirically test this aspect of...

Pharmaceutical firms spend increasing amounts in mergers and acquisitions (M&As), which raises the question of whether sufficient investment is left after mergers to further develop firms’ internal drug development capability. We evaluate the effects of M&As on firms’ post-merger R&D...

Mergers realize heterogeneous competitive effects on profits, production, and prices. To date, it is unclear whether differential merger outcomes are caused mostly by firms’ technology or product market attributes. Furthermore, empirical merger studies conventionally assume that, conditional...

In the past years Chinese firms increased their spending on R&D substantially and worked on achieving a higher quality level of R&D. We analyze whether different R&D activities show a positive influence on total factor productivity (TFP) for firms of different ownership types and across two time...

Pharmaceutical firms spend increasing amounts in mergers and acquisitions (M&As), which raises the question of whether sufficient investment is left after mergers to further develop firms' internal drug development capability. We evaluate the effects of M&As on firms' post-merger R&D investments...

This paper analyzes the importance of equity finance for the Ramp;D activity of small and medium-sized enterprises. We use information on almost 6000 German SMEs from a company survey. Using the intensity of banking competition at the district level as instrument to control for endogeneity, we...

China recently surpassed the USA as the greatest global source of patent applications. However, without internationally comparable measures of patent quality it remains questionable whether China's patent expansion constitutes the rise of a new technological superpower. Our novel quality index...