Multinational Production and the Scope of Innovation
2014/09/02
研討會日期 : 2014-09-02
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Alireza Naghavi
主持人 : Professor Shin-Kun Peng
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Professor Naghavi received his Ph.D. in Economics from University College Dublin in 2004. He is currently an Associate Professor at University of Bologna. His research fields are International Trade & Migration, Political Economy & Development, and Intellectual Property Rights and Innovation.
演講摘要 : This research sheds light on the role of multinational production on the type of innovation performed by firms. We construct matched firm-patent data to measure the scope of innovation, that is the extent to which the output of R&D can be spread across different product lines. We focus on two features of multinational production: (i) core knowledge is geographically more difficult to transfer abroad to foreign production sites, (ii) learning spillovers can occur from international operations. The results reveal that the second effect is more likely to dominate when a firm is active in more product lines. We argue that a more diversified portfolio of products increases a firm's span of learning from international operations, thereby enhancing its ability to engage in more fundamental research. In contrast, firms with fewer product lines that geographically separate production from innovation focus on more specialized types of R&D.
