We want to understand how important market frictions are in stifling the transmission of ideas from one firm to another. We use comprehensive data on patent applications from the European Patent Office and a multiple spells duration model to provide estimates that suggest that they are substantial.
We provide evidence on how changes in the use of high-skilled workers (inventors) in a foreign location affect a firm's domestic use of the same type of worker. We exploit rich data that provide variation in the location of inventors within multinational firms across industries and countries to control for confounding firm–time and industry factors. We find that a 10% increase in the use of foreign inventors leads to a 1.9% increase in the use of domestic inventors. Our results suggest that foreign and domestic inventors are complementary in the production of knowledge.
The authors investigate the effects of fragmentation in equity markets on the quality of trading outcomes in a panel of FTSE stocks over the period 2008–2011.
It can rarely be said that corporate tax excites the imagination of the public. Over the past several years, however, one aspect has at least piqued their interest: tax avoidance.
In 2014, 12 European countries are operating Intellectual Property (IP) Box regimes that provide substantially reduced rates of corporate tax for income derived from important forms of intellectual property. We describe the key features of the policies and incorporate them into forward-looking measures of the cost of capital and the effective average tax rate
We investigate evidence for spatially mediated knowledge transfer from university research. We examine whether firms locate R&D near universities, and whether those that do are more likely to co-operate with, or source knowledge from them.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, yesterday confirmed that a Patent Box will be introduced in the UK in 2013. This policy will reduce the rate of corporation tax on the income derived from patents to 10%. Our analysis suggests that the policy will lead to a large reduction in UK tax receipts from the income derived from patents, is poorly targeted at promoting research, will add complexity to the tax system, and it is far from clear that any additional research resulting from the policy will take place in the UK.
The tax treatment of intellectual property is currently in the spotlight and there is considerable interest in understanding how taxes affect firms' choices over where to hold patents for tax purposes.
