The determinants of YICs´ R&D activity
- Autores: José Carlos García de Quevedo Ruiz, Gabriele Pellegrino
- Localización: Documents de treball IEB, Nº. 31, 2011, 33 págs.
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
This paper examines the determinants of young innovative companies� (YICs) R&D activities taking into account the autoregressive nature of innovation.
Using a large longitudinal dataset comprising Spanish manufacturing firms over the period 1990- 2008, we find that previous R&D experience is a fundamental determinant for mature and young firms, albeit to a smaller extent in the case of the YICs, suggesting that their innovation behaviour is less persistent and more erratic.
Moreover, our results suggest that firm and market characteristics play a distinct role in boosting the innovation activity of firms of different age. In particular, while market concentration and the degree of product diversification are found to be important in boosting R&D activities in the subsample of mature firms only, YICs� spending on R&D appears to be more sensitive to demand-pull variables, suggesting the presence of credit constraints.
These results have been obtained using a recently proposed dynamic type-2 tobit estimator, which accounts for individual effects and efficiently handles the initial conditions problem.
