This study presents a novel empirical approach to identify financing constraints for innovation based on the concept of an ideal test (Hall, 2008). Firms were offered a hypothetical payment and asked ...to choose between alternatives of use. If they selected additional innovation projects, they must have had some unexploited investment opportunities that were not profitable using more costly external finance. We attribute constraints for innovation not only to lacking financing, but also to firms' innovative capability. Econometric results show that financial constraints do not depend on the availability of internal funds per se but that they are driven by innovative capability.
This study provides an exploratory analysis of differences between family and non-family firms in innovation investment, product and process innovation outcomes, and labor productivity. Using data ...from the Community Innovation Survey on 2,087 German small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), we observe significant disparities at each stage of the innovation process. Whereas family SMEs have a higher propensity to invest in innovation at all, conditional on investing in innovation, these companies do so less intensively than their non-family counterparts. Family SMEs further tend to outperform non-family SMEs in terms of process innovation outcomes when controlling for innovation investment. Given the level of product and process innovation, however, family SMEs underperform regarding labor productivity in comparison to non-family SMEs. These findings complement previous empirical research by illustrating how the presence of a dominant family relates to innovation inputs and outputs of SMEs in Europe's largest economy and its innovative SME sector.
This article estimates a dynamic structural model of discrete Research and Development (R&D) investment and quantifies its cost and long-run benefit for German manufacturing firms. The model ...incorporates linkages between R&D choice, product and process innovations, and future productivity and profits. The long-run payoff to R&D is the proportional difference in expected firm value generated by the investment. It increases firm value by 6.7% for the median firm in high-tech industries but only 2.8% in low-tech industries. Simulations show that reductions in maintenance costs of innovation significantly raise investment rates and productivity, whereas reductions in startup costs have little effect.
This article examines how productivity effects of human capital and innovation vary at different points of the conditional productivity distribution. Our analysis draws upon two large unbalanced ...panels of 6,634 enterprises in Germany and 14,841 enterprises in the Netherlands over the period 2000-2008, considering five manufacturing and services industries that differ in the level of technological intensity. Industries in the Netherlands are characterized by a larger average proportion of high-skilled employees and industries in Germany by a more unequal distribution of human capital intensity. In Germany, average innovation performance is higher in all industries, except for low-technology manufacturing, and in the Netherlands the innovation performance distributions are more dispersed. In both countries, we observe nonlinearities in the productivity effects of investing in product innovation in the majority of industries. Frontier firms enjoy the highest returns to product innovation whereas for process innovation the most negative returns are observed in the best-performing enterprises of most industries. We find that in both countries the returns to human capital increase with proximity to the technological frontier in industries with a low level of technological intensity. Strikingly, a negative complementarity effect between human capital and proximity to the technological frontier is observed in knowledge-intensive services, which is most pronounced for the Netherlands. Suggestive evidence suggests an interpretation of a winner-takes-all market in knowledge-intensive services.
This paper investigates whether firms innovate persistently or discontinuously over time using an innovation panel data set on German manufacturing and service firms for the period 1994-2002. It ...turns out that innovation behaviour is permanent at the firm level to a very large extent. Using a dynamic random effects discrete choice model and a new estimator recently proposed by Wooldridge (2005), I further shed some light on the driving forces for this phenomenon. The econometric results show that past innovation experience is an important determinant for manufacturing as well as for service sector firms, and hence confirm the hypothesis of true state dependence. In addition, the results highlight the important role of knowledge provided by skilled employees and unobserved individual heterogeneity in explaining the persistence of innovation.
Current prognostic clinical and morphological parameters are insufficient to accurately predict metastasis in individual melanoma patients. Several studies have described gene expression signatures ...to predict survival or metastasis of primary melanoma patients, however the reproducibility among these studies is disappointingly low.
We followed extended REMARK/Gould Rothberg criteria to identify gene sets predictive for metastasis in patients with primary cutaneous melanoma. For class comparison, gene expression data from 116 patients with clinical stage I/II (no metastasis) and 72 with III/IV primary melanoma (with metastasis) at time of first diagnosis were used. Significance analysis of microarrays identified the top 50 differentially expressed genes. In an independent data set from a second cohort of 28 primary melanoma patients, these genes were analyzed by multivariate Cox regression analysis and leave-one-out cross validation for association with development of metastatic disease. In a multivariate Cox regression analysis, expression of the genes Ena/vasodilator-stimulated phosphoprotein-like (EVL) and CD24 antigen gave the best predictive value (p = 0.001; p = 0.017, respectively). A multivariate Cox proportional hazards model revealed these genes as a potential independent predictor, which may possibly add (both p = 0.01) to the predictive value of the most important morphological indicator, Breslow depth.
Combination of molecular with morphological information may potentially enable an improved prediction of metastasis in primary melanoma patients. A strength of the gene expression set is the small number of genes, which should allow easy reevaluation in independent data sets and adequately designed clinical trials.
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Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The process of firms’ growth – in terms of productivity or employment – is a major concern of policy makers. In this context, innovations are considered to play a crucial role in stimulating firms’ ...performance. This book investigates this general hypothesis by looking at three topics: 1. Does innovation lead to an increase in employment growth? 2. Does innovation boost labour productivity? 3. Does innovation in one period improve innovation performance in subsequent periods? Based on a comprehensive innovation panel dataset for German firms, this book presents detailed results for each question, in particular by separating the effects induced by new products from those induced by the introduction of new production technologies. From a theoretical point of view, amongst others, a new multi-product model has been developed to study employment effects.
This paper examines how foreign-owned and domestically owned firms transform innovation into employment growth. The empirical analysis, based on the model of Harrison et al. (2008) and CIS data for ...16 countries, reveals important differences between the two groups: Due to general productivity increases and process innovation, foreign-owned firms experience higher job losses than domestically owned firms. At the same time, employment-creating effects of product innovation are larger for foreign-owned firms. Together with employment-stimulating effects stemming from existing products, they overcompensate the negative displacement effects resulting in net employment growth in foreign-owned firms. However, net employment growth turns out to be smaller in foreign-owned firms than in domestically owned firms. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
In human patients, a wide range of mutations in keratin (K) 5 or K14 lead to the blistering skin disorder epidermolysis bullosa simplex. Given that K14 deficiency does not lead to the ablation of a ...basal cell cytoskeleton because of a compensatory role of K15, we have investigated the requirement for the keratin cytoskeleton in basal cells by inactivating the K5 gene in mice. We report that the K5(-/-) mice die shortly after birth, lack keratin filaments in the basal epidermis, and are more severely affected than K14(-/-) mice. In contrast to the K14(-/-) mice, we detected a strong induction of the wound-healing keratin K6 in the suprabasal epidermis of cytolyzed areas of postnatal K5(-/-) mice. In addition, K5 and K14 mice differed with respect to tongue lesions. Moreover, we show that in the absence of K5 and other type II keratins, residual K14 and K15 aggregated along hemidesmosomes, demonstrating that individual keratins without a partner are stable in vivo. Our data indicate that K5 may be the natural partner of K15 and K17. We suggest that K5 null mutations may be lethal in human epidermolysis bullosa simplex patients.
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