The paper investigates how top R&D investors differ in the production impact of their inputs and in their rate of technical change. We use the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard and perform a quantile estimation of an augmented Cobb-Douglass production function for a panel of more than...

The paper investigates the extent to which outward FDI affect the MNC's capacity of entering (and remaining in) the club of top R&D world investors, benefiting from performance gains in both financial and economic markets. By merging the European Industrial Research and Innovation Scoreboard...

This paper investigates the innovation impact of intangibles by considering the decision of firms to invest in a comprehensive set of them. By using a new survey on a large sample of firms in 28 EU (plus 8 non-EU) countries, we first identify the principal components of the resources firms...

The paper investigates the impact that the multinational scope of firms' activities can have on their productivity. First, we argue that such an impact is both direct and indirect, and that the latter is channelled through higher incentives to invest in R&D. Second, we posit that the composition...

We investigate the extent to which financial constraints hamper the firms’ investment in intangibles. Drawing on the extant literature, we maintain that a distinction should be kept between innovators and non-innovators. Moreover, we argue that such a distinction should be investigated along...

This paper provides some new theoretical speculations and empirical evidence on the relationship between design, innovation and economic performance at the firm level. We posit that design investments may provide firms with a higher capacity of introducing product/process innovations, but that...

This paper provides the first empirical attempt of linking firms' profits and investment in R&D revisiting Knight's (1921) distinction between uncertainty and risk. Along with the risky profit-maximizing scenario, identifying a second, off-setting, unpredictable bias that leads to heterogeneous...

Patent boxes have been heavily debated for their role in corporate tax competition. This paper uses firm-level data for the period 2000-2011 for the top 2,000 corporate research and development (R&D) investors worldwide to consider the determinants of patent registration across a large sample of...

This paper sheds new lights on the internationalization of technological activities of the top corporate R&D investors worldwide. In particular, we provide evidence on the technological factors determining their international R&D location strategies. The empirical analysis is based on the...