The Economic Impact of CERN Procurement: Evidence from the Large Hadron Collider

Massimo Florio, Paolo Castelnovo (), Emanuela Sirtori, Lucio Rossi and Stefano Forte

Departmental Working Papers from Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at Università degli Studi di Milano

Abstract: Building the Large Hadron Collider (1995-2008) required frontier technologies. We wanted to discover whether there has been a long-term "learning by doing" effect on CERN suppliers' profitability, beyond the initial order. The evidence on this effect was until now fragmentary, mainly based on interviews or case histories. CERN granted us access to their LHC procurement database, including 1360 suppliers from 35 countries for a total of 11969 orders. We collected 23-year long time series of financial data (1991-2013) for a large sample of companies. After controlling for time fixed-effects and trends, firm-level and country-level possible confounding factors, we observe a statistically significant (p<0.01) 'CERN effect' on long-run profit margin of high-tech suppliers, while the effect on non-high-tech suppliers is not statistically significant.

Keywords: CERN; Large Hadron Collider; Technological spillovers; Supply chain (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O30 O33 Q55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-11-16
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mil:wpdepa:2016-12

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