Innovation

This Briefing Note considers recent trends in specialisation, outsourcing and offshoring of business services.

Many writers have claimed that research and development (R&D) has two faces.

We examine the contribution of human capital to economy-wide technological improvements through the two channels of innovation and imitation.

Our current understanding of economic growth emphasises the role of new knowledge created by profit-seeking firms as a primary source of long-run growth in GDP and living standards.

We use data on publicly traded U.K. firms to investigate whether financing choices differ systematically with R&D intensity.

Understanding why the UK has performed relatively poorly in terms of R&D is important for predicting whether current policies can halt this decline and ultimately narrow the productivity gap. This Briefing Note documents and disentangles trends in UK R&D over the period 1981-2000.

This paper presents a single unified framework that integrates the theoretical literature on Schumpeterian endogenous growth and major strands of the empirical literature on R&D, productivity growth and productivity convergence.

This paper investigates whether there is a convergence in Total Factor Productivity towards the technological frontier at the establishment level.

This paper examines the impact of fiscal incentives on the level of R&D investment.

Analysing the new IFS-Leverhulme database on over 200 major British firms since 1968 we show that patents have an economically and statistically significant impact on firm-level productivity and market value.

This paper investigates the relationship between product market competition (PMC) and innovation.

This paper investigates the economic impact of the government’s proposed new UK R&D tax credit.

This paper presents a unified model that integrates the theoretical literatue on Schumpeterian endogenous growth, the microeconometric literature on R&D and productivity, and the empirical literature on productivity convergence.

This Briefing Note reviews some of the major issues in the design and implementation of R&D tax credits. R&D tax credits have become a popular policy tool for encouraging R&D spending by business, with many countries offering subsidies of this form. Recent empirical evidence suggests that R&D tax credits are an effective instrument in stimulating additional R&D. However, in order to be desirable, a policy needs to be cost-effective and implementable.

In this paper we describe the IFS-Leverhulme patents dataset that we have constructed by combining information from the US Case-Western Patent database with UK company accounts and share price information from the London Stock Exchange.