Ratio Working Paper No. 231: The Return to R&D and Seller-buyer Interactions
Seerar Westerberg, H. (2014). The Return to R&D and Seller-buyer Interactions: A Quantile Regression Approach. Ratio Working Paper No. 231.
Seerar Westerberg, H. (2014). The Return to R&D and Seller-buyer Interactions: A Quantile Regression Approach. Ratio Working Paper No. 231.
In this paper we analyze whether a firm’s return to its R&D stock is affected by seller-buyer interactions. We suggest that firms that are in close contact with their customers will be relatively more sensitive to their customers’ needs, and therefore adjust their R&D activities accordingly. This, in turn, will boost sales and increase the return to R&D. To the extent that seller-buyer interactions are costly, large and productive firms will have an advantage in overcoming such costs. We test these hypotheses using a fixed effects quantile regression framework. Results suggest that large firms active in industries characterized by frequent seller-buyer interactions have a higher return to R&D than other firms.
Seerar Westerberg, H.
2014
Ratio Working Paper
2020
Ratio Working Paper
Business angels dominate early stage investment in firms but research on the effects of their investment is scarce and limited by sample selection. We therefore propose an algorithm for identifying business angel investment in total population data. We apply the algorithm to study the effects of business angels on firm performance, using detailed and longitudinal total population data for individuals and firms in Sweden. Employing these data and a quasi-experimental estimator, we find that business angels engage in firms that already perform above par but that there also is a positive effect on subsequent growth, comparing with control firms. Firms with business angel investment perform better in terms of sales and employment growth and likelihood of becoming a high-growth firm. Contrary to previous research, we cannot find any impact on firm survival, however. Overall, our results underline the need to address sample selection issues both in identifying business angels and in evaluating their effects on firm performance.
2020
Ratio Working Paper
We investigate to which extent shopping centers drive local economic development by studying how distance to newly established shopping centers affects the performance of incumbent firms, located in the suburbs of the three Swedish major metropolitan areas Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö, 2000-2016. We use a regression setup with around 27,000 firm-year observations and explore the possible heterogeneity imposed on the results from two main elements of spatial economics theory: the size of the new retail area and the distance from the new retail area to the analyzed incumbents. We observe a clear difference in the direction of the effects of large versus small shopping centers. While competition forces are much stronger in the case of the establishment of large shopping centers, yielding a negative 5% on incumbent firm revenue and negative 3% on firm employment, results indicate the opposite pattern for smaller shopping centers; with firm revenue and firm employment increasing 4% and 3%, respectively. Moreover, we also observe that both agglomeration and competition effects attenuate sharply with distance from the new entrant, confirming one of the central premises of retail location theory. Finally, we observe that the geographical scope of the effects is much wider in the case of larger shopping centers, with estimates becoming statistically insignificant at about 9-10 km from the new entry, as compared to 3-4 km in the case of smaller retail centers.
2019
Open innovation has rendered increased interest both in practice and research, and has expanded from dyadic transfers of ideas, to ecosystem levels. Knowledge is at the heart of open innovation, and this paper describes and discusses knowledge-transfer linkages for open innovation. It does so based on a literature review. The paper links together open innovation research with general management research to categorise and discuss linkages among parties in terms of their openness and how they relate to knowledge management. Conclusions indicate that openness needs to be considered in different dimensions that also links to different knowledge management outcomes. The paper’s contribution consists of how it connects open innovation research to the general management literature, and how it builds a practical understanding of how linkages between firms can be categorised to aid firms to consider which mechanisms they may choose and why.