NOMINEES FOR THE DRUID19 BEST PAPER AWARD
Will be presented at the DRUID DIRECTIONS parallel keynotes, Friday June 21, 11:00-12:00
Federico Tamagni, Dario Guarascio: “Persistence of innovation and patterns of firm growth”
Friday, June 21, 11.00-12.00 (SPs05)
Chair: Maryann Feldman
In this work we exploit a long-in-time panel of Spanish manufacturing firms observed during the period 1990-2012 to examine the long-run contribution of innovation persistence to sales growth and market share dynamics. We examine two main research questions. First, do persistent innovators grow more than other firms? Second, do persistent innovators show more persistent growth patterns over time compared to other firms? We find negative answers to both questions: firms that persistently innovate over the first decade, do not grow more and do not display more persistent growth dynamics in the succeeding years, regardless of whether innovation persistence is defined in terms of R&D, patenting activity, or product or process innovation. These findings lend support to luck and random theories of firm growth, in turn challenging innovation persistence theories commonly suggesting that persistent innovators enjoy large and persistent comparative advantages.
Rossella Salandra, Jan-Michael Ross: “Does rivalry influence selective reporting in scientific publications? The role of dyadic relationships and prior interactions in head-to-head clinical studies”
Friday, June 21, 11.00-12.00 (SPs07)
Chair: Anita McGahan
Does rivalry influence selective reporting in scientific publications? We define “rivalry” as a subset of competition that captures the subjective relationships between two competitors. Using data on head-to-head clinical trials for antidepressants, we find that the likelihood of selectively reporting drugs’ side effects in scientific articles is higher when the drugs investigated in the trial are rivals rather than non-rival opponents. We also find partial support for our arguments that this effect is strengthened when the scientific team includes a firm scientist, and weakened when the focal drug pre-empted the rival drug at market entry. Our study is novel in that it is the first study that explores the link between rivalry, product-market competition, and the content of scientific articles. By revealing conditions that are likely to trigger a “dark side” in publication practices, our study provides counterintuitive insights at the interplay between competition and science: What seems to be a practice aimed at mitigating uncertainty, i.e., the release of scientific information in product-market competition, can under some conditions enhance behavioral uncertainty and result in increased risk taking for firms that undertake comparative research.
Sergio Petralia, Dario Diodato, Andrea Morrison: “Migration and Invention in the Age of Mass Migration”
Friday, June 21, 11.00-12.00 (SPs08)
Chair: Ram Mudambi
More than 30 million people migrated to the US between the 1850s and 1920s. In the order of thousands became inventors and patentees. Drawing on an original dataset of immigrant inventors to the US, we assess the city-level impact of immigrants patenting and their potential crowding out effects on US native inventors. Our study contributes to the different strands of literature in economics, innovation studies and economic geography on the role of immigrants as carriers of knowledge. Our results show that immigrants’ patenting is positively associated with total patenting. We find also that immigrant inventors crowd-in US inventors. The growth in US inventors’ productivity can be explained also in terms of knowledge spill-overs generate by immigrants. Our findings are robust to several checks and to the implementation of an instrumental variable strategy.
