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Abstract: Empirical results on the link between growth and diversity in (un)related industries proved to be highly dependent on the specific regional, temporal and econometric context. Using highly disaggregated employment data at the sub‐regional level, we find that higher employment growth in Austria is mainly linked to unrelated variety. However, in‐depth analyses by sectors and regional regimes illustrate substantial heterogeneity in the results, with services and a large number of relatively small non‐urban regions driving the overall results. Thus, our findings argue against structural policy conclusions based on assessments neglecting the specific sectoral and regional context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing body of literature mentioning the slow progress of energy technological innovation as compared to information technology (IT), but the reasons why the energy sector is perplexed by slow innovation remain unexplained. Based on a variety-expanding endogenous technological change model, this paper investigates the economic mechanism that underlines the slow pace of energy technological progress. We show that in the market equilibrium the growth rate of energy technology variety is always lower than that of IT variety, this outcome stems from both the market fundamentals where the homogeneity of end-use energy goods is less likely to harness the pecuniary externality embedded in the love-for-variety household, and the technology fundamentals where capital-intensiveness of energy technology assets inhibits the non-pecuniary technological externality associated with knowledge spillovers. We further show that the social planner allocation can raise the rate of technological progress in both energy and IT sectors, but still fails to achieve an outcome in which technological progress in the energy sector can catch up with the IT sector. Finally, using efficiency-improving revenue-neutral policy interventions that subsidize energy sectors and tax IT sectors, the decentralized market equilibrium can achieve an outcome in which both energy and IT sectors have the same rate of technological progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate econometrically whether cultural diversity at the workplace boosts innovation. Our longitudinal linked employer-employee data combines two innovation surveys, with Dutch administrative, tax and regional data. We analyse the determinants of a firm's product and process innovations with respect to the firm's internal resources, employee composition and regional agglomeration externalities. We reconfirm the findings of several other recent studies showing a positive partial correlation between innovation and cultural diversity in pooled cross-sectional data; in some cases even when accounting for reverse causation. However, no statistically significant traces of benefit for innovation from cultural diversity remain after introducing firm fixed effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the decision of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to participate in official standard setting alliances. Based on micro data of German firms in the electrical engineering and machinery industry, we show that innovation-related variables follow the predictions of our hypotheses. Research and development (R&D) intensity exhibits an inverse U-shaped relationship on the likelihood to join alliances. The positive relation suggests that SMEs aim to access the knowledge of larger firms whereas the negative relationship indicates that SMEs exceeding a certain threshold of R&D activity are reluctant to participate in standardization because their knowledge is too essential to disclose to competitors. The importance to access external knowledge via standardization committees is underlined by a positive correlation with the relevance of incoming knowledge spillovers and a negative correlation with the relative size of companies’ patent portfolios. Besides these variables, we also explore the traditionally considered factors for alliance formation and show that firm size and export intensity are positively correlated with participation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]