Andrea Vezzulli

The Unequal Benefits of Academic Patenting for Science and Engineering Research

The increase of university patents has raised issues of potential conflicts of interest in Faculty activities. Nonetheless, recent empirical evidence has indicated that very productive scientists contribute disproportionally to academic patenting and that inventing is likely to encourage an increase in scientific productivity. This article adds to this evidence by showing that such beneficial effects are not likely to be earned equally by every scientist. The analysis was run in a large sample of Italian scientists contributing to materials sciences in either chemistry or engineering of materials, and makes use of several econometric techniques that are suitable for treating unobserved heterogeneity, excess zeros, and incidental truncation. Results indicate that benefits are higher when the feedback from applied research is richer, and when regimes of secrecy are less harsh, which is more likely to be the case with engineering, as opposed to hard science research. If confirmed by further evidence, the findings suggest that academic policies in matters of intellectual property rights should be refined and tailored to field specificities.

Innovation, profitability and growth in medium and high-tech manufacturing industries: Evidence from Italy

The main goal of this article is to assess the impact of product innovation on the economic performance of firms operating in Medium and High-Tech (M&HT) industries. Using information from a large and unique dataset on Italian firms we estimate, by means of Propensity Score (PS) matching methods, a positive and significant ‘innovation premium’ both in terms of profitability and growth (in the short-run) for those firms who introduced new innovative products. We also find that this innovation premium is particularly large for small firms and even more so when considering new established firms.

The Geography of Knowledge Spillovers: The Role of Inventors’ Mobility Across Firms and in Space

Spatial concentration of knowledge flows is often brought up as a key source of increasing returns to location, and a major explanation for the clusterization of innovation activities. While mainstream economics most often sums up all sources of such concentration under the notion of “localized knowledge spillovers”, evolutionary economic geography addresses the spatial and social dimensions of proximity as separate geographical dimensions. In this spirit, we revisit both the JTH test of the localization of knowledge spillovers (Jaffe et al. 1993) and its extension by Agrawal et al. (2006). We find that inventors who patent across different companies and geographical locations contribute extensively to the observed citation patterns, both directly (through personal self-citations) and indirectly, by linking the various companies via a social network conducive to more citations. We also find that social networks convey knowledge both to the mobile inventors’ current locations, and to the prior ones. We conclude that spatial distance is just a proxy for social distance, of which the professional ties between inventors are an important component.

R&D investments, financing constraints, exporting and productivity

ABSTRACT This paper adds new empirical evidence on the mutual relationships between credit constraints, total factor productivity, Research and Development (R&D) investments and exporting, by jointly considering them in a simultaneous equation framework. Our empirical analysis focuses on a large sample of manufacturing firms from France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Our results confirm the well-known mutual positive correlation among exporting, R&D and firms productivity. They also show the existence of a mutual relationship between exporting, productivity and credit constraints: exporters and high productivity firms are less likely to be credit constrained, while better access to credit is associated with larger productivity and a higher probability of exporting. By contrast, we find no significant relation between investing in R&D and the probability to be credit constrained, conditional on exporting. This suggests that efficiency-improving strategies, mediated by the existence of credit constraints, are at the core of firm growth achieved through exporting and innovation.

What role can mutual guarantee consortia play for financing innovation? A firm-level study for Italy

It is widely acknowledged that firms performing RD Hall, 2002). This situation calls into question the role that mutual guarantee consortia (MGC) might have in mitigating the effect of financial constraints on the innovative activities performed by small and medium enterprises (SMEs). In this paper, we explore how effectively this role is played by exploiting a large dataset of guarantee-backed loans provided by Eurofidi (an Italian mutual guarantee consortium), including both financial and non-financial information on applicant firms. We find that, when the destination of loans is considered, applications demanded to sustain R&D and innovation activities have a lower probability of being accepted, but they also have a lower probability of turning into bad loans (conditional on loans acceptance), thus highlighting the potential absence of a minimising default risk behaviour by the granting institution (Boyes et al., 1989) with respect to the observed characteristics of the applicants.

Access to Credit for Small Innovative Businesses

Using data for a large sample of small firms collected through the 8th UniCredit Survey conducted in 2011, we investigate the extent to which banks of different size reward innovative firms, in terms of both access to lending and volume of credit granted. We find that more innovative firms are associated with weak credit rationing. Using instrumental variable techniques to manage the endogenous nature of innovation, we show that a large bank more strongly supports product innovation, whereas there is no substantial difference in the extent to which small and large banks provide credit to small firms undertaking process innovations.

Guarantee-Backed Loans and R&D Investment - Do Mutual Guarantee Consortiums Value R&D?

[It is widely acknowledged that firms performing R&D investments are very likely to undergo financial constraints (FC) due to their specific characteristics, which make external debt an imperfect substitute for internal finance,especially for small sized enterprises. This situation calls into question the role that mutual guarantee consortiums(MGCs) might have in mitigating the effect of FC on the innovative activities performed by small and medium enterprises. In this paper, we explore how effectively this role is played by exploiting a large dataset of guaranteebacked loans provided by Eurofidi (an Italian mutual guarantee consortium) including both financial and non financial informations on the applicant firms. Taking into account the different purposes of each loan application (including whether it was asked for sustaining investments in R&D and innovation), we estimate the probability of default (PD)through a bivariate probit which takes into account the problem of sample selection bias that usually affects credit scoring models calibrated only on accepted applicants. We find a crucial set of variables that increase (decrease) the probability of positive granting decision without reducing (raising) the likelihood of a default, thus evidencing the absence of a minimizing default risk behavior of the lending institution with respect to these observed characteristics of the applicants. In particular, when the destination of loans is considered, results show that loans demanded to sustain R&D and innovation activities have a lower probability of turning into bad loans but they also have a lower probability of being accepted. It emerges that innovative firms are subject to relevant credit constraints also when considering the possibility to apply to a mutual guarantee body, which should theoretically facilitate their access to debt finance.]