U.S. Research Joint Ventures with International Partners

Stuart Allen and Albert Link

No 13-15, UNCG Economics Working Papers from University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Department of Economics

Abstract: In the United States, as in most industrialized nations, aggregate technological advancement declined during the 1970s and early 1980s. The U.S. Congress was quick to respond to this down turn by passing a number of technology- and innovation-related initiatives, one of which was the National Cooperative Research Act (NCRA) of 1984. It has been argued that this policy response is an example of government acting as entrepreneur because the enabling legislation was both innovative and characterized by entrepreneurial risk. In this paper we examine empirically covariates with the trend in the formation of research joint ventures (RJVs) promulgated by the NCRA and with the probability that a RJV will have an international research partner. We find that RJV formations seem to increase in times when industrial investments in research and development (R&D) decrease, and we conclude that RJVs might thus be a substitute for internal R&D activity. We also find that the probability of a RJV having an international research partner increases as the membership size of the RJV increases. We conclude that as membership size increases, the ability of any one member to appropriate the collective research contributions from the other members, and thus gain a competitive advantage, decreases. Thus, the cost of including in the RJV an international partner, which we argue could represent a potential intellectual capital leakage, decreases.

Keywords: Research joint venture; Strategic alliance; Technology; Innovation; Technological change; Entrepreneurship (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L26 L44 O33 O34 O38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2013-10-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-ent, nep-ino and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://bryan.uncg.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/13-15.pdf Full text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

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:ris:uncgec:2013_015

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in UNCG Economics Working Papers from University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Department of Economics UNC Greensboro, Department of Economics, PO Box 26170, Bryan Building 462, Greensboro, NC 27402. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Albert Link ().