The Empirical Economics of Innovation and Patenting

Innovation is widely believed to be a key long-term driving force for competitiveness and growth of firms and national economies as a whole. Recent years have even seen a surge of empirical studies on innovation and patenting, in particular at the firm level. This seminar will focus on the firm-level empirical evidence of the effects of innovation and patenting in different dimensions. Topics include among others:

• How productive is R&D in terms of patenting?
• Do product and process innovations enhance productivity?
• Do product and process innovations enhance profitability?
• Do product and process innovations stimulate employment?
• Do innovations favour high-skilled employees (technological skill bias)?
• Do patents and innovation increase the value of the firm?
• Are knowledge diversity and knowledge relatedness conducive to firm performance?
• How much do firms benefit from R&D activities by other firms (spillovers)?
• Do spillovers lead to more innovation co-operation?
• Does co-operation lead to higher innovation success?
• Do firms with international R&D subsidiaries benefit from knowledge abroad?

This seminar targets master students from Business Administration and Management and Economics. Basic skills in empirical economics or econometrics are recommended.
Students from Business Administration and Management and Economics can use the credit points for the course as follows:

• MA: Wahlpflichtbereich BWL 5
• MA: Seminare Management and Economics

The seminar is limited to a maximum of 30 students (first come, first served). Please indicate your willingness to participate by e-mail to entrepreneurship@business.uzh.ch. The topics will be randomly assigned to groups of two students in the introductory session. If you have any preferences with respect to the person you want to work with, please let us know his/her name in your e-mail.

• Introductory session: This session will provide an overview of the theme. Furthermore, I will introduce the topics for presentation including a list of references and provide guidelines on how to prepare the presentation.
• Presentation: Groups of two students need to present one topic. Moreover, a short seminar paper (max. 10 pages) and a handout/copy of the slides need to be prepared by the groups for each student in class. The topic to be presented will be assigned randomly.
• Credit Points: The seminar is worth 3 ECTS points. To obtain the credit points, the following requirements have to be fulfilled:

• Seminar paper (summary of max. 10 pages): (30%)
• Presentation (30%)
• Handout (10%)
• Active participation during the seminar (30%)

The preliminary schedule is as follows: