Among available policy levers to boost innovation, investment in applied research organisations has received little empirical attention. In this paper, we analyse the case of the Fraunhofer Society, the largest public applied research organization in Germany. We analyse whether project...

R&D expenditures of firms varies vastly between and within industries. In recent years a lot of theoretical and empirical studies attempted to explain the distribution of R&D expenditures. Four main factors repeatedly appeared in this literature: Firm size, market power, appropriability and...

The missing effect of investments of firms in information and communication technologies on productivity is studied by various recent papers (e.g. Oliner and Sichels 1994, Landauer 1995, Brynjolfsson and Hitt 1996). Several explanations are given for this missing link. Our paper deals with two...

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected firms in many economies. Exploiting treatment heterogeneity, we use a difference-in-differences design to causally identify the short-run impact of COVID-19 on innovation spending in 2020 and expected innovation spending in subsequent years. Based on a...