Special Issue Monográfico 2009 'Innovación, emprendimiento y territorio'

This paper provides a revision on the growing interdependencies that today we can find among the works that address the business dynamics and spatial economics. In recent years, an increasing attention to knowledge as competitive resource of businesses and territories, the presence of increasing returns in growth trajectories and the role of major metropolitan areas, among others, has facilitated the study of the dynamics entrepreneurship and innovation from a territorial approach. The articles compiled in this special issue were presented on Symposium on Business Dynamics and Innovation: The effects of agglomeration economies, organized by the Reference Network of Catalonia Applied Economics and Regional Research magazine.

This paper shows how and why the Solow growth accounting framework is useful for linking entrepreneurship capital to economic growth. The knowledge filter impedes the spillover of knowledge for commercialization, thereby weakening the impact of knowledge investments on economic growth. By serving as a conduit for knowledge spillovers, entrepreneurship is the missing link between investments in new knowledge and economic growth. Entrepreneurship is an important mechanism permeating the knowledge filter to facilitate the spillover of knowledge and ultimately generate economic growth. The emergence of entrepreneurship policy to promote economic growth is interpreted as an attempt to promote entrepreneurship capital, or the capacity of an economy to generate the start-up and growth of new firms.

Few areas in economics enjoy better theoretical grounds than Industrial Organization. And David Austretsch has greatly contributed to improve the IO field with his own dynamic models of entrepreneurship and, also, the inspiration and stimulus he has instilled to other scholars. In his article published in this issue Audretsch discusses two main concepts: one is the model of the filter of knowledge; the other is the idea of entrepreneurship capital. The concept of filter of knowledge is central to the present discussion about the links between scientific and technological knowledge generation and its effective rate of transfer to market innovation. It shows why and how those agents that generate knowledge are seldom the same that get to commercialize it. The bridge is often an entrepreneur. The second idea, here highlighted, about entrepreneurship capital has become in some way very popular thanks the publication of many reports on rates of firm creation. In this case, although the theoretical concept is worth developing, the empirical application of the model has proven to be difficult and ambiguous until now.

We aim at gaining our understanding on the relationship between innovation capacity, entrepreneurial activity and regional competitiveness at a sub-regional level, by taking into account the heterogeneity of inner locations within a region. Our results show, on the one hand, that high and rapid growth firms benefit from local agglomeration economies which lead to incremental innovation-type R&D activities (i.e., exploitation of synthetic-knowledge) emerged in non-metropolitan areas where new ventures are more focused on `Development´ activities rather than on `Research´ activities. On the other hand, ventures located in metropolitan areas are more related to `Research´ activities (i.e., exploration of analytical-knowledge leading to radical innovation) which particularly take place in universities and technology centers sited in urban (or nearby) areas. Any advancement on regional development will depend on a balanced concentration of different types of innovation and entrepreneurial activities at a sub-regional level considering the idiosyncrasy and singularity of each sub-region.

The existence of restrictions for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to access long-term credit has led governments to establish institutional systems to facilitate such access and reduce the cost of credit, with the condition that its feasibility is justified (and assessed) and there are no distortions as regards competition. Very few empirical in-depth studies exist regarding this field of academic research, and scarce attention has been paid from a regional perspective. Due to the characteristics of the business structures in the different regions, as well as the existence of agglomeration economies and the regional dispersion of the entrepreneurship rate, this paper analyses the effects of the productive financing support model, provided by the Government of Spain, through the Instituto de Crédito Oficial (ICO) [Official Credit Institute], on the behaviours and performances of the beneficiary companies. In the last decade, this source of financing has assigned 30,000 million euro. The results show the general acceptance of this policy due to its adaptation to the interests of the companies and its contribution to the improvement of the economic-financial efficiency indicators. Regionally, no substantial differences have been observed, but the results of this research show a greater contribution to the dynamism of the more progressive regions.

This article analyses the effect of immigration flows on the growth and efficiency of manufacturing firms in Spanish cities. While most studies were focusing on the effect immigrants have on labour markets at an aggregate level, here, we argue that the impact of immigration on firm performance should not only be considered in terms of the labour market, but also in terms of how city´s amenities can affect the performance of firms. Implementing a panel data methodology, we show that the immigrants´ increasing pressure has a positive effect on labour productivity and wages and a negative effect on the job evolution of these manufacturing firms. In addition, both small and new firms are more sensitive to the pressures of immigrant inflow, while foreign market oriented firms report higher productivity levels and a less marked impact of immigration than their counterparts. We also present a set of instruments to control for endogeneity. It allows us to confirm the effect of local immigration flows on the performance of manufacturing firms.

The analysis of the impact of agglomeration economies on firm location is one of the main issues on Regional Economics. However, despite of the broad and solid theoretical developments in this area, empirical findings show a worrying lack of robustness. This paper examines one possible cause: The Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP). To that end, it is estimated the influence of agglomeration economies on the firm location in Spain for five different divisions of the territory. The results indicate that the estimates are very sensitive to the definition of areas of analysis which cannot be neglected to contrast the hypotheses. Finally, it proposes a methodology to reduce the drawbacks of MAUP and exploit his potential benefits.

This article highlights the contributions of business dynamics research to industrial policy design. Business creation support programs are widespread despite the fact that the optimal rate of business creation and destruction remains unknown. Economic analysis emphasizes heterogeneity as the most salient characteristic of industrial dynamics. A better knowledge of the different types of entrepreneurs, their behavior and their specific contribution to innovation and growth would allow to see into `black box´ of business dynamics and would facilitate the design of appropriate public policies. The empirical analysis performed shows that self-employment has a quite different economic nature than business with employees. Public programs should not promote indiscriminate entry but rather give priority to able entrants with survival capacities. Survival of entrants is positively related to their size at birth. Innovation and investment improve the survival of new manufacturing firms. Investment in R&D increases the risk of failure in new firms, although it improves the competitiveness of the incumbents.

A new 45-industry, 23-year, dataset for Japan is used to investigate the duration of industry leadership. A new scaling relationship linking a firm´s current market share with the standard deviation of market share changes is reported. This relationship discriminates in a powerful way between rival candidate theoretical models of market share dynamics. It also makes possible a useful simplification in testing a benchmark model of a Markovian kind. Relative to that model, it is found that at least some industries display a `Chandlerian´ bias toward longer durations of leadership than would be present in the benchmark model.

This article offers a short introduction to the contributions of John Sutton to the analysis of market structure, with particular reference to the Bounds Approach. The article offers a presentation of a recent work of John Sutton, reproduced in this issue of Investigaciones Regionales, which examines the evolution of market shares to address debates regarding the `persistence of dominance´ question.

Based on the Knowledge Production Function framework given by Griliches (1979), we slightly modify it so that the innovative output depends upon a set of factors related to the firm internal characteristics and are influenced by the environment. Specifically, regarding the firm internal determinants the effect of the concentration of the ownership, the composition of the boards of directors and the effect of the nature of the ownership (foreign and public) are analyzed. Additionally, in order to capture the determinants of the environment in which the firm operates other variables concerning the internationalization of market, the agglomeration economies and the regional knowledge externalities are also considered. In order to assess the impact of these determinants on the number of patents and models of use awarded by the firm, the discreteness of the latter variable has to be taken into account. We apply Poisson and Negative Binomial models for a more comprehensive evaluation of the hypothesis in a panel of Spanish manufacturing firms. The results show patenting activity is positively favoured by being located in an environment with a high innovative activity, due to the existence of knowledge spillovers and agglomeration economies.

The recent evolution of the international trade has been characterized, among others factors, by an increasing supplying of intermediate inputs in the international markets. In this article these firm´s decisions are analyzed, comparing the characteristics of size, productivity, age, intensity of capital, composition of manpower, innovating effort, costs, participation of foreign capital between the companies that make international outsourcing and those that do not do it. In order to organize the empirical analysis we take as reference the model of Antràs and Helpman (2004) that predicts the companies with greater productivity they select themselves when taking the decision to do international outsourcing. The article offers empirical evidence that confirms this prediction from a sample of Spanish industrial companies of the Encuesta sobre Estrategias Empresariales.

This work examines the effects that R&D subsidies have on the R&D performed by the Spanish firms in the period 1998-2005. Despite the growth of empirical evidence with respect to the effects of R&D subsidies on firms´ innovative effort, few papers have established comparisons between technology policies implemented by regional and central governments. After a brief review of the existing literature, firm participation and the effects of R&D programs at regional and central level are analyzed. Empirical evidence is presented, in order to have a basis for comparison about effectiveness of the technology policies in regional and central level.