Productivity and Heterogeneous Knowledge: Exploring the Relationship in a Sample of Drug Developers

Giulio Bottazzi and Tatiana Plotnikova

No 2010-044, Jena Economics Research Papers from Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena

Abstract: This paper aims to investigate the effect of knowledge characteristics on the total factor productivity of firms developing drugs in the pharmaceutical industry. We decompose knowledge into knowledge associated with the technological firm portfolio and knowledge related to R&D projects, which represent drug development at the clinical testing stage. The latter is attributed to the knowledge of relevant markets where the drugs will be sold. The results show that the effect of technological coherence vs. market coherence and of accumulated knowledge on the productivity of firms differs. Productivity increases with the number of patents and decreases with the patent diversity and project portfolio coherence. When considering only the project knowledge, the diversity of the project portfolio positively affects productivity.

Keywords: total factor productivity; diversity; coherence; knowledge (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D24 L25 L65 O32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-07-26
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-eff, nep-ino, nep-ipr, nep-pr~, nep-knm, nep-ppm, nep-sbm and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://oweb.b67.uni-jena.de/Papers/jerp2010/wp_2010_044.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:jrp:jrpwrp:2010-044

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Jena Economics Research Papers from Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Markus Pasche (markus.pasche@uni-jena.de).