Stijn Kelchtermans

Top Research Productivity and Its Persistence: Gender as a Double-Edged Sword

The paper contributes to the debate on top performance in research productivity, its persistence over time, and the impact of gender. It uses a panel data set comprising the publications of all biomedical and exact scientists at the University of Leuven in the period 1992 to 2001. We find that women have a significant lower probability of reaching top performance for the first time in their career, particularly for top performance measured through citations, but there is no evidence for a gender bias hindering repeated top performance. On the contrary, women seem to persist in top performance more easily than men do.

Dipping in the Policy Mix: Do R&D Subsidies Foster Behavioral Additionality Effects of R&D Tax Credits?

We analyze how behavioral additionality effects of wage-based R&D tax credits are influenced by the firms joint use of R&D subsidies. Using matching estimators and a multivariate probit analysis of cross-sectional survey data on Belgian firms, we find that R&D subsidies induce tax credit users to focus more strongly on research relative to development and to accelerate the execution of R&D projects. To a slightly lesser extent, we also find size effects, firms scaling up current R&D or initiating additional projects. Overall, these findings suggest that companies that benefit from the ‘policy mix’ respond more strongly to R&D tax credits and use the tax-exempted resources to adopt a more strategic approach to R&D.

Participation and Schooling in a Public System of Higher Education

We analyze the determinants of participation (whether to study) and schooling (where and what to study) in a public system of higher education, based on a unique dataset of all eligible high school pupils in an essentially closed region (Flanders). We find that pupils perceive the available institutions and programs as close substitutes, implying an ambiguous role for travel costs: they hardly affect the participation decisions, but have a strong impact on the schooling decisions. In addition, high school background plays an important role in both the participation and schooling decisions. To illustrate how our empirical results can inform the debate on reforming public systems, we assess the effects of tuition fee increases. Uniform cost-based tuition fee increases achieve most of the welfare gains; the additional gains from fee differentiation are relatively unimportant. These welfare gains are quite large if one makes conservative assumptions on the social cost of public funds, and there is a substantial redistribution from students to outsiders.

Top Research Productivity and its Persistence

The paper contributes to the debate on cumulative advantage effects in academic research by examining top performance in research and its persistence over time, using a panel dataset comprising the publications of biomedical and exact scientists at the KU Leuven in the period 1992-2001. We study the selection of researchers into productivity categories and analyse how they switch between these categories over time. About 25% achieves top performance at least once, while 5% is persistently top. Analysing the hazard to first and subsequent top performance shows strong support for an accumulative process. Rank, gender, hierarchical position and past performance are highly significant explanatory factors.

Internal Basic Research, External Basic Research and the Technological Performance of Pharmaceutical Firms

We evaluate the impact of basic research on pharmaceutical firms technological performance, distinguishing between internal basic research and the exploitation of external basic research findings. We find that firms increase their performance by engaging more in internal basic research, in particular if basic research is conducted in collaboration with university scientists. The exploitation of external basic research improves performance, while the magnitude increases with firms involvement in internal basic research. Hence, internal basic research and the exploitation of external basic research are complements, suggesting that internal basic research provides firms with the skills to exploit external basic research more effectively.

RIO Country Report 2016: Belgium

The 2016 series of RIO Country Reports analyse and assess the policy and the national research and innovation system developments in relation to national policy priorities and the EU policy agenda with special focus on ERA and Innovation Union. The executive summaries of these reports put forward the main challenges of the research and innovation systems.

Thanks, but No Thanks: Companies’ Response to R&D Tax Credits

This paper starts from the observation that the majority of firms in Belgium that were eligible for a newly introduced R&D tax credit system does not use it, or is slow to adopt, despite significant potential cost savings. We hypothesize that the R&D support landscape is complex for firms to navigate and that they may cope by relying on their peers’ behaviour to inform their own adoption decisions. We identify endogenous peer effects in industry- and location-based peer groups by exploiting the intransitivity in firms’ peer group networks as well the variation in peer group sizes. The results show that firms’ decisions to use R&D tax credits are indeed influenced by the choices of their peers, primarily in the time window following the introduction. Our analysis complements the literature on peer effects in firm decision making and suggests improvements for the communication of new public support measures for business R&D.