In this work, we develop and apply a methodology to estimate technology-specific R&D investments at the firm level and then use these to test some arguments that have become central in the innovation literature. In particular, we first combine R&D investments with patent data of the world top...

Many industrialized countries in Europe and North America have experienced a steady decline in the manufacturing sector over the last few decades. Amid growing concerns that outsourcing and offshoring have destabilized European economies, policymakers have suggested that a large manufacturing...

The paper investigates the extent to which outward FDI affect the MNC's capacity of entering (and remaining in) the club of top R&D world investors, benefiting from performance gains in both financial and economic markets. By merging the European Industrial Research and Innovation Scoreboard...

The paper investigates the impact that the multinational scope of firms' activities can have on their productivity. First, we argue that such an impact is both direct and indirect, and that the latter is channelled through higher incentives to invest in R&D. Second, we posit that the composition...

Private sector R&D is largely concentrated in a few multinational companies (MNCs), which thus play an important role in the creation of knowledge and technology in the economy. The mobility of labor between these firms and the rest of the economy is therefore an important mechanism for the...

This paper provides some new theoretical speculations and empirical evidence on the relationship between design, innovation and economic performance at the firm level. We posit that design investments may provide firms with a higher capacity of introducing product/process innovations, but that...