Pierre Mohnen

Maastricht University | UM · Maastricht Graduate School of Governance

Using quasi-experimental treatment effect methods with unique longitudinal survey data, the paper assesses the impact of vocational training on economic mobility in the short, medium and long term in Thailand. We find that vocational training does not affect upward mobility in terms of income, expenditure and employment. The analysis of the heterog...

This article analyses whether and to what extent social protection expenditure varies with institutional quality and people’s preferences using cross‐section and cross‐country panel data. It uses data on expenditure taken from the International Labour Office database focusing on 52 low‐ and middle‐income countries and on 80 high‐, low‐ and middle‐i...

The interaction between formal and informal businesses continues to grow in African countries. Yet, competition from informal enterprises remains one of the top three obstacles formal businesses face in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper investigates the effect of informal competition on the performance of innovative products introduced by formal firms...

The paper reports on an ex-ante evaluation of the nationwide scale up of two pilot cash transfer programmes in Uganda. We use panel data to estimate consumption elasticities of child health status and school enrolment. They provide the main parameters of a micro-simulation model predicting cash transfer effects on human capital accumulation and fee...

The eight papers of this ICC Special Section address the relationships between innovation of different kinds - related to products, processes, or organizational arrangements - in their effects on job creation and job destruction at the level of both firm and whole sectors, in a wide range of countries from all continents except North America and Oc...

This article tests whether product and process innovations increase employment in three European countries - France, Germany, and The Netherlands - and in the People's Republic of China on the basis of the same underlying theoretical framework and comparable harmonized micro data. The data pertain to the period 2002-2004 and cover the manufacturing...

In this paper, we compare the impacts of management practices and innovation on productivity, using data from a unique firm-level survey covering 30 countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia in the period 2011–2014. We estimate a structural model linking productivity to innovation activities and management practices. Results suggest that both re...

This paper examines whether there are complementarities between investments in ICT, R&D and organizational innovation, and the effects of different investment profiles on total factor productivity growth on Dutch firm-level data. We estimate an integrated model of investment profile adoption and total factor productivity growth. We find that the th...

Econometrics consists in combining economic theory and data with statistical methods and computational procedures in order to improve economic knowledge and policies.

Collaboration between firms and universities, two main actors in the national system of innovation, brings the needs of the business world to the attention of the scientific community and allow scientific progress to be diffused more quickly in the real world. The aim of the paper is to compare the determinants of university-industry cooperation ac...

Despite the high profile of the issue in current policy formulations in low-income countries (LICs), there is little large firm level survey based empirical evidence on innovativeness and firm performance, especially in informal establishments. This paper aims to fill this gap in the literature using a revised Crépon-Duguet-Mairesse (CDM) structura...

Using micro evidence from manufacturing and services firms located in 41 African countries, this paper shows that better management practice, reflected by international management certification, helps firms to raise productivity. Larger and older firms and firms operating closer to the technological frontier are more likely to possess international...

In year 1998, the seminal paper Research Innovation and Productivity: An Econometric Analysis at the Firm Level was published in this journal. The empirical framework, following on ideas in the research of Zvi Griliches at the NBER and commonly labeled CDM (the acronym of the three authors’ names, Crépon, Duguet and Mairesse) is one of the most inf...

Patent boxes are tax incentive schemes aimed at stimulating research and development (R&D) in firms by providing favourable tax rates to profits that can be linked to a specific immaterial asset, such as a patent. Because these profits are often hard to separate from other firm profits, patent boxes have been argued to be prone to tax shifting of f...

Econometrics consists in combining economic theory and data with statistical methods and computational procedures in order to improve economic knowledge and policies.

Using recently collected firm-level data from Egypt and Tunisia, this paper explores the effect of institutional obstacles and corruption on the innovative behavior of firms and their effect on firms’ employment growth. We estimate the micro-level interactions between corruption and institutional obstacles and test the hypothesis that corruption ‘g...

Almost all empirical research that has attempted to assess the validity of the Porter hypothesis (PH) has started from reduced-form models, for example, single-equation models for estimating the contribution of environmental regulation to productivity. This paper follows a structural approach that allows testing what is known in the literature as t...

We present a set of theoretical and empirical papers and briefly describe the specific contributions to the Macroeconomic Dynamics special issue on technology aspects in the process of development.

Purpose - In this paper we focus on SMEs in Croatia operating in the manufacturing and services sectors, and seek to compare them in terms of their involvement in innovation activities, and the factors determining their decision to innovate, in general and in four types of innovations in particular: product/service, process, organizational and mark...

In this study, we review the literature on the creation and diffusion of innovation in the private sectors (industry and services) in developing countries. In particular, we collect evidence on what are the barriers to innovation creation and diffusion and the channels of innovation diffusion to and within developing countries. We find that innovat...

This study estimates the rates of return of non-contributory social transfer programmes in Cambodia using household-level data and going beyond standard cost-efficiency analyses by developing a dynamic microsimulation model. It shows that social protection promotes equitable economic growth by enhancing human capital and fostering economic performa...

The use of fiscal policy instruments to stimulate private R&D is widespread and important in some countries like Spain. In this paper we explore the effectiveness of R&D tax incentives on knowledge capital accumulation in Spanish manufacturing firms using an unbalanced panel and compare the estimates based on claimed and claimable tax reductions. W...

The use of fiscal policy instruments to stimulate private R&D is widespread and important in some countries like Spain. In this paper we explore the effectiveness of R&D tax incentives on knowledge capital accumulation in Spanish manufacturing firms using an unbalanced panel and compare the estimates based on claimed and claimable tax reductions. W...

The use of fiscal policy instruments to stimulate private R&D is widespread and important in some countries like Spain. In this paper we explore the effectiveness of R&D tax incentives on knowledge capital accumulation in Spanish manufacturing firms using an unbalanced panel and compare the estimates based on claimed and claimable tax reductions. W...

This paper presents an econometric analysis of the characteristics of firm’s cooperating with universities using Community Innovation Survey (CIS) data for 14 European countries. Our model incorporates three groups of variables which could be related to the probability to cooperate with universities. The first group of variables is related to the s...

In order to catch up with the current technological frontier, firms, especially in developing countries, try to acquire technological advancement through internal R&D efforts, as well as through external technology-sourcing activities. This study tests whether these two sources of technology acquisition are complements or substitutes for each other...

This paper reviews the existing evidence regarding the effects of technological and non-technological innovations on the productivity of firms and the existence of possible complementarities between these different forms of innovation.

This paper introduces dynamics in the R&D to innovation and innovation to productivity relationships, which have mostly been estimated on cross-sectional data. It considers four nonlinear dynamic simultaneous equations models that include individual effects and idiosyncratic errors correlated across equations and that differ in the way innovation e...

The focus in this paper is on non-contributory social transfers which are considered to be the main social protection instruments targeted specifically at poor and vulnerable households, and which are financed from general government revenues. Eligibility for non-contributory transfers does not depend on employment records and contributions made in...

This paper examines the impact of the Dutch R&D tax incentive scheme on the wages of R&D workers. We construct firm specific R&D tax credit rates that vary over time following variations in the Dutch R&D tax incentive program. Using instrumental variables we estimate a wage-sharing model with an unbalanced firm-level panel data covering the period...

Almost all empirical research that has attempted to assess the validity of the Porter Hypothesis has started from reduced-form models, e.g. by using single-equation models for estimating the contribution of environmental regulation (ER) to productivity. This paper addresses the Porter Hypothesis within a structural approach that allows us to test w...

There is growing evidence that firms increasingly adopt open innovation practices. In this paper we investigate the impact of two such external knowledge acquisition strategies, ‘buy’ and ‘cooperate’, on firm’s product innovation performance. Taking a direct (productivity) approach, we test for complementarity effects in the simultaneous use of the...

On the one hand, firms prefer to perform R&D in an open mode (letting R&D be performed extramurally or even selling their R&D services) to benefit from knowledge spillovers and complementarities between internal and external R&D. On the other hand, they may also like to perform R&D in a closed mode (funding and executing their R&D intramurally) to...

We study whether there is scope for using subsidies to smooth out barriers to R&D performance and expand the share of R&D firms in Spain. We consider a dynamic model with sunk entry costs in which firms’ optimal participation strategy is defined in terms of two subsidy thresholds that characterise entry and continuation. We compute the subsidy thre...

Using a unique panel data of Dutch innovation and financial variables we empirically investigate how financing and innovation vary across firm characteristics. The study also tries to gauge the extent of market failure due to the presence of financing frictions. Our main findings can be summarized as follows. First, when firms face endogenous finan...

This paper investigates relationships between innovation input, innovation output and labor productivity in China for four major manufacturing sectors; textiles, wearing apparel, transport equipment and electronic equipment. It uses a large sample of firm level micro data and a structural model in the estimation. The data from 2005 to 2006 is estim...

Since its transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy, Vietnam has been under pressure to reduce the size of the state-owned sector. In this process, the private sector has emerged. The objective of this paper is to examine how the privatization could contribute better to economic growth and hence further accelerate poverty redu...

The purpose of this guideline is to provide ideas and technical advice on how to measure the effectiveness of Science, Technology and Innovation Programs (STIP). The paper addresses the specific challenges of evaluating STIP, from the assessment of the intervention logic to the choice of the most appropriate method to solve the attribution problem....

This paper proposes a Bayesian approach to estimating a factor-augmented GDP per capita equation. We exploit the panel dimension of our data and distinguish between individual-specific and time-specific factors. On the basis of 21 technology, infrastructure, and institutional indicators from 82 countries over a 19-year period (1990 to 2008), we con...

This study focuses on innovation in a cluster of informal shoemaking firms in Ethiopia - namely the Mercato footwear cluster. It examines how differently those firms are embedded in networks and how heterogeneous they are in absorptive capacity, and how this heterogeneity affects their innovation performance. Business interactions with buyers, supp...

We review the econometric literature on measuring the returns to R&D. The theoretical frameworks that have been used are outlined, followed by an extensive discussion of measurement and econometric issues that arise when estimating the models. We then provide a series of tables summarizing the major results that have been obtained and conclude with...

We propose a model where both R&D and ICT investment feed into a system of three innovation output equations (product, process and organizational innovation), which ultimately feeds into a productivity equation. We find that ICT investment and usage are important drivers of innovation in both manufacturing and services. Doing more R&D has a positiv...

After presenting the history, the evolution and the content of innovation surveys, we discuss the characteristics of the data they contain and the challenge they pose to the analyst and the econometrician. We document the two uses that have been made of these data: the construction of scoreboards for monitoring innovation and the scholarly analysis...

Three historical papers on the influence of the innovative entrepreneur upon the achievements of their economies were presented at the annual meeting of the ASSA held in Atlanta in January 2010. The focus of the session was on the incentive structure built into the institutions of the three economies investigated, each of which had experienced an e...

This paper evaluates whether public support from innovation from the central government or the European Union spurs innovation in Austrian firms. The effect is estimated separately on R&D expenditures and the output side of innovation, measured by the share of total sales due to new or substantially modified products. A distinction is also made bet...

After joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) China experienced a major inflow of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). Many famous automobile firms from developed countries decided to invest in China in order to cooperate with domestic firms. The question is whether FDI benefited the development of the Chinese automobile industry. On the one hand, f...

This paper examines the impact of the R&D fiscal incentive program on R&D by Dutch firms. Taking a factor-demand approach we measure the elasticity of firm R&D capital accumulation to its user cost. Econometric models are estimated using a rich unbalanced panel of firm data covering the period 1996-2004 with firm-specific R&D user costs varying wit...

[eng] We present a two-sided search model where agents differ by their human capital endowment and where workers of different skill are imperfect substitutes. Then the labor market endogenously divides into disjoint segments and wage inequality will depend on the degree of labor market segmentation. The most important results are : 1) overall wage...

The Dutch 16th and 17th centuries were a period of unprecedented economic prosperity. Since the Dutch economy was and is very small, an important source of growth was bound to be international trade. In this paper we argue that the contributions of entrepreneurship to innovation transcend the standard categories of creation of new products and proc...

An employer–employee panel is used to study whether the movement of workers across firms is a channel of unintended diffusion of R&D-generated knowledge. Somewhat surprisingly, hiring workers from others’ R&D labs to one's own does not seem to be a significant spillover channel. Hiring workers previously in R&D to one's non-R&D activities, however,...

This paper studies the dynamic relationship between input and output of innovation in Dutch manufacturing using an unbalanced panel of enterprise data from five waves of the Community Innovation Survey during 1994-2004. We estimate by maximum likelihood a dynamic panel data bivariate tobit with double-index sample selection accounting for individua...

We take a critical look at how to assess the effectiveness of R&D tax incentives. The net welfare gain is shown to be sensitive to a certain number of parameters. In particular, the deadweight loss associated with level-based tax incentives depends on the ex-ante R&D level. We report on the success of a past policy changes and simulate the effect o...

In this paper we evaluate the effectiveness of R&D tax incentives in Quebec, using manufacturing firm data from 1997 to 2003 originating from R&D surveys, annual surveys of manufactures and administrative data. The estimated price elasticity of R&D is -0.10 in the short run and -0.14 in the long run, with a slightly higher elasticities for small fi...

Abstract This paper looks at the effectiveness of R&D grants for Canadian plants that already benefit from R&D tax credits. Using a non-parametric matching estimator and data from the 2005 Survey of Innovation from Statistics Canada, we find that firms that benefited from both policy measures introduced more new products than their counterparts tha...

The Canadian comparative advantage is determined by the maximization of foreign earnings, subject to 10 input–output relations between 29 industries and 92 commodities. Free trade would boost the mining, quarrying and oil wells, tobacco, and machinery sectors. The structure of the economy is not self-sufficient, as a necessary and sufficient price...

India and Bangladesh pursued policies of trade liberalization since the early 1990s. However, due to the differential speeds of opening up, Bangladesh’s bilateral trade deficit with India widened substantially over the years. This aggravated the economic and the political tensions between the economies. It has been held that the promotion of free t...

Neoclassical economists argue that competition promotes efficiency, but Schumpeter argues that it is monopoly rents that help entrepreneurs to invest in RandD We investigate the overall effect of competition on TFP-growth. We use rent, defined as the factor reward above its perfectly competitive value, as a negative measure of competition. Our main...

Can the slowdown in total factor productivity that we have experienced since the mid-seventies be ascribed to the increasing importance of services, or do we instead observe an improvement of productivity in the service sectors byway of learning-by-doing or specialization?We feel that such questions are best answered within a general equilibrium an...

The standard measure of productivity growth is the Solow residual. Its evaluation requires data on factor input shares or prices. Since these prices are presumed to match factor productivities, the standard procedure amounts to accepting at face value what is supposed to be measured. In this paper, we determine total factor productivity growth with...

Many empirical studies have confirmed the positive impact of innovation on productivity at the firm level. The focus tends to be either on R&D driven techno-logical innovation on the one hand, or on organisational changes complemented by ICT on the other. To investigate the effect of different types of innovations on produc-tivity, we propose a mod...

In this paper we characterize the extent of economic integration between Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan (HKMT). We do not find, for the period of 1999-2003, consistent evidence that economic activity on the part of HKMT-funded companies contributed to productivity growth in Guangdong domestic manufacturing firms. Furthermore, HKMT-funded c...

In the late 1980s scholars of technological change were concerned about measuring more aspects of innovation than the mere information contained in the R&D surveys. They sat down under the auspices of the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and wrote the so-called Oslo manual, which set out the guidelines for a new type of...

In this paper we examine the importance of financial and other obstacles to innovation in the Netherlands using statistical information from the CIS 3.5 innovation survey. We report results on the effect of these obstacles on the firms' decision to abandon, prematurely stop, seriously slow down, or not to start an innovative project. These results...

This study examines whether the transfer of knowledge flows from universities to enterprises in Canada is hampered by the geographical distance that separates them. The transfer of knowledge flows are measured by the amount of R&D payments from business enterprises to universities that are directly reported in Statistics Canada's survey on Research...

In May 2007, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi suddenly banned cooking street foods, with Supreme Court endorsement. Public health concerns overrode implications for the livelihoods of food sellers or Delhi's food culture. This article interprets the ban through an analysis of municipal policy against a backdrop of economic reforms, restructuring...

Using cross-sectional firm-level data, this paper examines the determinants of productivity among manufacturing firms in Tanzania. In particular, it seeks to evaluate the relative importance of technological advances and the business environment in which firms operate in affecting productivity. Of the technological variables, R&D as well as product...

Using firm-level data from five developing countries—Brazil, Ecuador, South Africa, Tanzania, and Bangladesh—and three industries—food processing, textiles, and the garments and leather products—this article examines the importance of various sources of knowledge for explaining productivity and formally tests whether sector- or country-specific cha...

This paper examines the impact of the Dutch R&D tax incentives program, known as WBSO, on the wages of R&D workers. In our model these wages are partly determined by the governments WBSO tax disbursements. We construct detailed firm- and time specific R&D tax credit rates as a function of the R&D tax incentives scheme to capture the wage effects of...

An employer-employee panel is used to study whether the movement of workers across firms is a channel of unintended diffusion of R&D-generated knowledge. Somewhat surprisingly, hiring workers from others' R&D labs to one's own does not seem to be a significant spillover channel. Hiring workers previously in R&D to one's non-R&D activities, however,...

Neoclassical economists argue that competition promotes efficiency, but Schumpeter argues that it is monopoly rents that help entrepreneurs to invest in R&D. We investigate the overall effect of competition on total factor productivity growth (TFP) growth. We use rent, defined as the factor reward above its perfectly competitive value, as a negativ...

The connection between finance and investment starts with any violation of the Modigliani-Miller theorem (Modigliani and Miller, 1958), usually modelled formally via imperfect information. According to Ross, Westerfield and Jordan (1993) about 80 per cent of all financing is done with internally generated funds. Explanations for this behaviour usua...

This paper examines the impact of the Dutch R&D fiscal incentive program, known as WBSO, on R&D capital formation. Taking a factor-demand approach we measure the elasticity of firm R&D capital accumulation to its user cost. An econometric model is estimated using a rich unbalanced panel covering the period 1996-2004 with firm-specific R&D user cost...

This paper looks at the effectiveness of R&D grants for Canadian plants that already benefit from R&D tax credits. Using a non-parametric matching estimator, we find that firms that benefited from both policy measures introduced more new products than their counterparts that only benefited from R&D tax incentives. They also made more world-first pr...