Using novel data on European firms, this paper examines the effect of business group affiliation on innovation. We find that business groups foster the scale and novelty of corporate innovation. Group affiliation is particularly important in industries that rely more on external finance and have...

The commercial value of basic knowledge depends on the arrival of follow-up developments mostly from outside the boundaries of the inventing firm. Private returns would depend on the extent the inventing firm internalizes these follow-up developments. Such internalization is less likely to occur...

It is shown that spillovers can enhance private returns to innovation if they feed back into the dynamic research of the original inventor (Internalized spillovers), but will always reduce private returns, if the original inventor does not benefit from the advancements other inventors build into...