In the past years Chinese firms increased their spending on R&D substantially and worked on achieving a higher quality level of R&D. We analyze whether different R&D activities show a positive influence on total factor productivity (TFP) for firms of different ownership types and across two time...

China recently surpassed the USA as the greatest global source of patent applications. However, without internationally comparable measures of patent quality it remains questionable whether China's patent expansion constitutes the rise of a new technological superpower. Our novel quality index...

Considering China's policy-driven patent expansion, we validate domestic citations in comparison to foreign ones, which are exogenous to China's policy, as economic indicators. We derive internationally comparable citation data from international search reports. Whereas foreign citations show...

This paper analyzes the importance of equity finance for the Ramp;D activity of small and medium-sized enterprises. We use information on almost 6000 German SMEs from a company survey. Using the intensity of banking competition at the district level as instrument to control for endogeneity, we...

Owners of private companies are often highly underdiversified which exposes them to idiosyncratic risk. We investigate the consequences of underdiversification at the company level. Information on US companies and their owners is obtained from the Survey of Consumer Finances and the Survey of...

Innovation processes within corporations increasingly tap into international technology sources, yet little is known about the relative contribution of different types of innovation channels. We investigate the effectiveness of different types of international technology sourcing activities...

Because China has become one of the largest applicants of PCT patents, it is of interest to compare the quality of Chinese and non-Chinese applications. We extend a quality index based on internationally comparable citation data from international search reports (ISR) to consider foreign,...