The Path of R&D Efficiency over Time

Pilar Beneito, María Engracia Rochina-Barrachina and Amparo Sanchis-Llopis
Additional contact information
María Engracia Rochina-Barrachina: University of Valencia
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Maria Engracia Rochina Barrachina

No 1403, Working Papers from Department of Applied Economics II, Universidad de Valencia

Abstract: In this paper we investigate the pattern of R&D efficiency in terms of the number of product innovations achieved by firms over time. Embodied in the R&D capital stock, we distinguish among physical R&D capital and human R&D capital, and allow the latter to be subject to dynamic returns along firms’ R&D histories. We assume that firms’ innovation outcomes depend on the length of the period of time they have been investing in R&D and explore whether the interruption in this temporal sequence of engagement in R&D affects the rate of achievement of innovation outcomes. For this purpose, we estimate an innovation production function using a panel dataset of Spanish manufacturing firms for the period 1990-2006. Our results suggest that R&D activities exhibit dynamic returns that are increasing but at a decreasing rate, possibly due to exhaustion of innovation opportunities. In addition, our findings indicate that interruptions of R&D activities reduce R&D efficiency, probably due to organizational forgetting. However, spillover effects seem to exist between firms’ R&D spells since firms resuming R&D activities achieve innovation success rates above the innovation rates of their initial years of R&D activities.

Keywords: R&D; dynamic returns; interruptions; product innovation; count data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2014-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-ino, nep-knm, nep-sbm and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://repecsrv.uv.es/paper/RePEc/pdf/eec_1403.pdf First version, 2014 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The path of R&D efficiency over time (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eec:wpaper:1403

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Applied Economics II, Universidad de Valencia Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vicente Esteve ().