Inverted-U relationship between innovation and survival: Evidence from firm-level UK data

Mehmet Ugur (), Eshref Trushin and Edna Solomon

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Theoretical and empirical work on innovation and firm survival has produced varied and often conflicting findings. In this paper, we draw on Schumpeterian models of competition and innovation and stochastic models of firm dynamics to demonstrate that the conflicting findings may be due to linear specifications of the innovation-survival relationship. We demonstrate that a quadratic specification is appropriate theoretically and fits the data well. Our findings from an unbalanced panel of 39,705 UK firms from 1997-2012 indicate that an inverted-U relationship holds for different types of R&D expenditures and sources of funding. We also report that R&D intensity is more likely to increase survival when firms are in more concentrated industries and in Pavitt technology classes consisting of specialized suppliers of technology and scale-intensive industries. Finally, we report that the effects of firm and industry characteristics as well as macroeconomic environment indicators are all consistent with prior findings. The results are robust to step-wise modeling, controlling for left truncation and use of lagged values to address potential simultaneity bias.

Keywords: Innovation; post-entry performance; R&D; survival analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C41 D22 L1 O21 O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-10-19, Revised 2015-11-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-com, nep-cse, nep-eff, nep-ent, nep-eur, nep-ino, nep-knm, nep-sbm and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/68010/1/MPRA_paper_68010.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Inverted-U relationship between innovation and survival: evidence from firm-level UK data (2015)
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:pra:mprapa:68010

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().