The growing importance of technology-relevant non-publication output of university research has come into the focus of policy-makers' interest. A fierce debate arose on possible negative consequences of the increasing commercialization of science, as it may come with a reduction in research...

This study investigates the impact of R&D subsidies on R&D investment during the past financial crisis. We conduct a treatment effects analysis and show that R&D subsidies increased R&D spending among subsidized small and medium sized firms in Germany during the crisis years. In the first crisis...

Open standard-setting organizations (SSOs) have emerged as important coordination and diffusion mechanism for information and communication technologies. Open standards are developed non-discriminatorily and licensed to anybody at reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. Little is known about...

Classical patent literature assumes that patents grant well-defined legal rights to exclude others from practicing an invention. In this scenario, start-up companies benefit from the exclusive right to commercialize patent-protected inventions and the certification effect of patents which...

This paper analyzes the effect of public R&D subsidies on firms' private R&D investment per employee and new product sales in German manufacturing. Parametric and semiparametric two-step selection models are applied to this evaluation problem. The results show that the average treatment effect...

The increasing commercialization of university discoveries has initiated a controversy on the impact for scientific research. It has been argued that an increasing orientation towards commercialization may have a negative impact on more fundamental research efforts in science. Several scholars...

This paper analyzes the effects of public subsidies on R&D expenditure in the German manufacturing sector. The focus is on the question whether public R&D funding stimulates or crowds out private investment. Cross sectional data at the firm level is used. By applying parametric and...

Technological change is often hypothesized as one of the main drivers of merger activities. This paper analyzes the role of technology in mergers and acquisitions (M&As) at the firm level. Based on a newly created data set that combines financial information and patent data for public limited...

This paper tests some of the predictions of recent advances in trade theory that have focused on different trade patterns of firms within the same sector. Helpman, Melitz and Yeaple (2005) develop a model in which innate productivity differences between firms determine the degree of...

This study investigates whether standard patent measures for the importance and basicness of patents are able to distinguish between 'wacky' patents and a control group of randomly drawn patents. Our findings show that forward citations are good predictors of importance. However, the 'wacky'...