Der Beitrag untersucht, inwieweit hinter der oft konstatierten Investitionsschwäche der europäischen Wirtschaft eine Strukturverschiebung von materiellen zu immateriellen Investitionen steht. Da letztere nur zum Teil unter den Investitionsbegriff der Volkswirtschaftlichen Gesamtrechnung...

The paper investigates the reaction of public R&D spending on economic crises. We are interested in two counteracting motives: On the one hand, public R&D spending can be seen as a means to fight the crisis, and governments may decide to increase their R&D budgets. On the other hand, a crisis...

Non-technological innovation is an important element of firms' innovation activities that both supplement and complement technological innovation, i.e. the introduction of new products and new processes. We analyse the spread of nontechnological innovation in firms, their relation to...

Usually patent data does not contain any unique identifiers for the patenting assignees or the inventors, as the main tasks of patent authorities is the examination of applications and the administration of the patent documents as public contracts and not the support of the empirical analysis of...

We use an exogenous change in German Federal law to examine how entrepreneurial support and the ownership of patent rights influence academic entrepreneurship. In 2002, the German Federal Government enacted a major reform called Knowledge Creates Markets that set up new infrastructure to...

We examine how the ownership of intellectual property rights influences patenting of university-discovered inventions. In 2002, Germany transferred patent rights from faculty members to their universities. To identify the effect on the volume of patenting, we exploit the researcher-level...

This paper discusses a tool for optimization of econometric models based on genetic algorithms. First, we briefly describe the concept of this optimization technique. Then, we explain the design of a specifically developed algorithm and apply it to a difficult econometric problem, the...

Extending a recently developed multiproduct model and distinguishing between different product and process innovation activities, this paper reports new results on the relationship between innovation and employment growth in manufacturing and service firms in Germany. The model is tailor-made...

This paper investigates whether firms innovate persistently or discontinuously over time using an innovation panel data set on German manufacturing and service firms for the period 1994-2002. We find that innovation behaviour is permanent at the firmlevel to a very large extent. Using a dynamic...