R&D Spillover Effects on the Strategic Behavior of Large International Firms during the World Financial Crisis


  •  Luigi Aldieri    
  •  Maria Carmela Aprile    
  •  Concetto Paolo Vinci    

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between competition and innovation through the knowledge spillover effect. In particular, we investigate whether R&D competition is sensitive to economic shock. To this end, we consider a period of time related also to the 2008 financial crisis. We implement an empirical analysis of 879 worldwide R&D-intensive firms. In order to measure technological proximity, we use two approaches: one based on Jaffe industry weight matrix, relative to patents distributed across technology classes; one based on trade intensity between sectors using input–output matrix data. The empirical results show a positive effect of R&D externalities on competitive interactions before the beginning of crisis and a negative one after it. These findings are robust with respect to the procedure employed in the estimation method.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.