Collaboration in innovation: An empirical test of Varieties of Capitalism

摘要

Do country-level institutions drive firm-level collaboration in invention? Hall and Soskice's (2001) Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) contends that the institutional configurations of modern capitalist economies push organizations towards country-specific behavioral patterns in terms of collaboration frequency and duration. In this article, we first extract these claims from the VoC literature and then test them in the empirical setting of collaboration in invention. Towards this end, we construct an original dataset of patents and employ a novel metric of historical collaboration stickiness. We find strong support in favor of Hall and Soskice's prediction that inter-firm collaboration will be more common within coordinated-market economies. However, the VoC claim that organizations within coordinated-market economies will form more durable collaborative relationships than those formed within liberal-market economies does not hold up to empirical scrutiny.