Accessibility to R&D and Patent Production

Urban Gråsjö ()

No 37, Working Paper Series in Economics and Institutions of Innovation from Royal Institute of Technology, CESIS - Centre of Excellence for Science and Innovation Studies

Abstract: The main purpose in this paper is to study to what extent accessibility to R&D can explain patent production. Therefore a knowledge production function is estimated both on aggregated level and for different industrial sectors. The output of the knowledge production is the number patent applications in Swedish municipalities from 1994 to 1999. In order to account for the importance of proximity, the explanatory variables are expressed as accessibilities to university and company R&D. The total accessibility is then decomposed into local, intra-regional and inter-regional accessibility to R&D. As often is the case with R&D outputs, the regional distribution of patents is highly skewed with influential outliers. The estimations are therefore conducted with quantile regressions. The main results on aggregated level indicate that high accessibility (local) to company R&D has the greatest positive effects on patent production. The effects are statistically significant for municipalities with a patent production corresponding to the median and to quantiles above the median. Local accessibility to university R&D is only of importance for certain industrial sectors and not on aggregated level. There is also evidence that intra-regional accessibility to company R&D affects patent production positively. A conclusion is that concentrated R&D investments in companies situated in municipalities with a high patenting activity would not only gain the municipalities themselves, but also the patent production in other municipalities in the functional region.

Keywords: innovations; patents; R&D; knowledge production functions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C30 O31 O33 O34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2005-08-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ino and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://static.sys.kth.se/itm/wp/cesis/cesiswp37.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: Accessibility to R&D and Patent Production (2009)
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:hhs:cesisp:0037

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series in Economics and Institutions of Innovation from Royal Institute of Technology, CESIS - Centre of Excellence for Science and Innovation Studies CESIS - Centre of Excellence for Science and Innovation Studies, Royal Institute of Technology, SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vardan Hovsepyan ().