Are Collaborative Agreements in Innovation Activities Persistent at the Firm Level? Empirical Evidence for the Spanish Case

Abstract

We provide evidence on the dynamics in firms' cooperation behaviour in innovation activities. Our main objective is to analyse if collaborative agreements are persistent at the firm level; and, in such a case, to study what are the main drivers of this phenomenon. We also study to what extent such persistence is different from persistence in R&D, so that the former exists on top of the latter. Finally, we deal with the differentiated persistence pattern of collaboration agreements for different types of partners, as well as the possibility of finding persistence across them. We follow a dynamic approach in the analysis of cooperation persistence: We take into account the unobserved individual heterogeneity and address the initial conditions problem. We use a representative sample of Spanish firms for the period 2002-2010.