Economic development theories and their learning frameworks differently address farms and firms. This article argues that the traditional double-standard of the primacy of manufacturing rests on a debatable stages model that under-recognizes learning and innovation in agriculture and its...

Obtaining indicators on innovation activities of firms has been a challenge in economic research for a long time. The most frequently used indicators - R&D expenditure and patents - provide an incomplete picture as they represent inputs and throughputs in the innovation process. Output...

This paper studies the relationship between patience and comparative development through a combination of reduced-form analyses and model estimations. Based on a globally representative dataset on time preference in 76 countries, we document two sets of stylized facts. First, patience is...

We analyze the impact of subsidies on R&D expenditures in the financial crisis and beyond. The financial crisis has led to considerable turmoil in financing and, as a result, to restrictions of firms' access to external financing. Utilizing this fact, we identify and analyze financing...

We study the 1956 consent decree against the Bell System to investigate whether patents held by a dominant firm are harmful for innovation and if so, whether compulsory licensing can provide an effective remedy. The consent decree settled an antitrust lawsuit that charged Bell with having...

This paper discusses the university-enterprise interactions in the Brazilian innovation system by focusing on the characteristics of the public research infrastructure which affects its propensity to interact with the industrial sector. Logistic regressions have been used to identify, in a wide...

Since the mid-1970s, firm entry rates in the United States have declined significantly. This also holds for other OECD countries over the past years. At the same time, these economies experienced a gradual process of population aging. Applying a tractable life-cycle model with endogenous firm...

The goal of science is to advance knowledge, yet little is known about its value for marketplace inventions. While important breakthrough technologies could not have been developed without scientific background, skeptics argue that this is the exception rather than the rule, questioning the...

In this paper, we introduce the concept of a Digital Layer to empirically investigate inter-firm relations at any geographical scale of analysis. The Digital Layer is created from large-scale, structured web scraping of firm websites, their textual content and the hyperlinks among them. Using...

Web-based innovation indicators may provide new insights into firm-level innovation activities. However, little is known yet about the accuracy and relevance of web-based information. In this study, we use 4,485 German firms from the Mannheim Innovation Panel (MIP) 2019 to analyze which website...