For a generation the federal government has maintained programs promoting research joint ventures (RJV's). The ostensible motivation late in the going was to promote knowledge spillovers. The real motivation was to stem the perceived decline of American competitiveness. It is not obvious,...

The research provides evidence from a dataset of R&D joint venture contracts about how firms organize collaborative R&D. We work out of a dataset of 96 contracts to construct a taxonomy of the types of mechanisms firms use in organizing collaborative R&D. We identify mechanisms with particular...