What’s behind the disparities in firm innovation rates across regions? Evidence on composition and context effects

Amber Naz (), Annekatrin Niebuhr and Jan Cornelius Peters

The Annals of Regional Science, 2015, vol. 55, issue 1, 156 pages

Abstract: Empirical evidence on innovation activity points to both significant disparities in innovation output across regions and important differences in firm innovation rates. These differences suggest that firm characteristics as well as regional factors might impact on innovation. Evidence on the relative importance of the two groups of factors is still scarce and ambiguous. We analyze the impact of firm characteristics and the regional context on differences in firm innovation rates in Germany for the period 1998–2009. By combining firm-level data with information on the regional environment, we can distinguish between composition effects caused by the selection of highly innovative firms in specific regions and the impact of regional factors. Our results indicate that the propensity to innovate of firms located in agglomerations significantly exceeds the innovation output of plants in rural regions. To analyze the role of the regional context for the firm’s probability to innovate, we use a multilevel approach. Besides controlling for important firm-level factors such as R&D employment, size and age of the firm, we also account for different regional factors. The regression results point to a positive association between regional R&D activity and the firm’s innovation output. Moreover, the effect of the regional context seems to differ with the size, age and R&D intensity of the firms. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015

Keywords: C25; D22; O31; R15; R16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00168-015-0694-9 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:spr:anresc:v:55:y:2015:i:1:p:131-156

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://link.springer.com/journal/168

DOI: 10.1007/s00168-015-0694-9

Access Statistics for this article

The Annals of Regional Science is currently edited by Martin Andersson, E. Kim and Janet E. Kohlhase

More articles in The Annals of Regional Science from Springer, Western Regional Science Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().