José García Quevedo, Gabriele Pellegrino, Marco Vivarelli
This study examines the relationship between R&D drivers and firm's age, 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 younger firms, 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 ages. In particular, while market concentration and the degree of product diversification are found to be important in fostering R&D activities in the subsample of mature firms only, young firms� spending on R&D appears to be more sensitive to demand-pull variables.
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.
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