Three essays on R&D and technology licensing in Brazil.

摘要

This dissertation is composed of three essays which share a unifying theme as well as a common dataset. All investigate aspects of technological change, modeling the choice between licensing foreign technology and developing new technology through R&D. The introductory chapter includes a brief history of relevant law while the unique dataset created for this work, merging Brazilian firm-level tax data with patent and license records for 800 firms across time, is described in Chapter Two. Policy considerations for the current period of liberalization conclude each chapter and are summarized in the final chapter.; Chapter Three models the choice between R&D expenditures and technology licensing behaviour in Brazil at the firm level, explicitly considering corner solutions using Kuhn-Tucker conditions. Econometric estimation reveals that while very small firms see technology licensing and R&D as contemporaneous substitutes, firms of moderate to large size treat them as complements. Licensing experience and foreign R&D spillovers also play key roles in the decision.; The fourth chapter models the two-part decision of a patent application: whether to engage in innovative activity, and then whether to patent the results of that activity. Results indicate that the interactions between current R&D, past licensing and firm size are prime contributors to innovative success, but the effects of licensing enter primarily with a lag, reflecting the time required to absorb and build upon acquired knowledge. Licensing history affects whether firms apply for full patents or utility model protection.; Licensing contracts are the subject of the fifth chapter, were industry-level data are analyzed to outline significant relationships between industries, licensor regions, contract size, duration, and financial details. An aggregrate demand model for technology contracts is constructed and estimates show most notably that spillovers, both disembodied (in the form of pure knowledge) and embodied (in the form of imports), play important roles in the demand for licenses.