Narrow Results

There has been a pronounced increase in research and development (R&D) expenditure in Singapore since the late 1990s, with government spending accounting for a sizeable share. This increase has been spurred by increasing public policy emphasis on research and innovation as engines of economic growth. Building upon earlier work (Ho et al., 2009; Ho and Wong, 2017), this paper provides an updated analysis of the impact of R&D on the economic performance of Singapore over four decades from 1978 to 2019 through the use of time series analysis. The Cobb–Douglas production function-based analysis shows a long-run equilibrium relationship between total factor productivity (TFP) and R&D investments. We found that in both long- and short-run productivity of R&D, Singapore tends to lag behind the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations. This suggests leakage of value capture and low absorptive capacity of local firms. Possibility of R&D productivity improvements induced by major policy changes over the last two decades was examined, but no evidence of significant structural breaks was found. Lastly, Granger causality analysis reveals that public sector R&D augments private sector R&D capital, thus playing an important role in generating externalities and spillover effects. Policy implications of our findings for Singapore are discussed.

Harnessing enterprise digital transformation to drive green technological innovation and achieve carbon reduction goals is an inevitable trend amid carbon reduction efforts. This study analyzed the impact of digital transformation on green technological innovation and the mediating role of innovation factors through a regression analysis model. The results indicate that digital transformation impacted the quantity of green technology innovation significantly more than quality. This impact was mediated by knowledge capital, human capital, physical capital, and innovation consciousness. The positive influence of digital transformation on green technology innovation varied based on corporate ownership nature and geographical location. Furthermore, the negative impact of green technology innovation on corporate value diminished over time. It is imperative for multiple stakeholders, including governments and enterprises, to collaborate in promoting innovation mobility. They should fully leverage the impact of digital transformation to enhance the quality and quantity of green technological innovation.

This study explores the efficiencies of firm’s R&D investment depending on the degree of reliance on government funding relative to firms’ private funding. Stochastic frontier analysis is applied on a sample of 30 provinces with data on R&D inputs and innovation outputs by all large- and medium-sized industrial firms in these provinces from 2000 to 2013. It is found that R&D investment financed by firms’ private funding is more efficient than that by government funding in generating new products, whereas R&D investment financed by government funding is more efficient than that by firms’ private funding in producing new patents.

Supply disruption is one of the crucial risks faced by supply chains in the changing external environment. To mitigate supply disruption risk and enhance resilience, product upgrading with Research and Development (R&D) investment is widely adopted by firms. In this paper, we establish a game-theoretic model to study the operation decisions and product upgrading strategies for a supply chain. Specifically, Firm 1 faces supply disruption risks when selling a normal product with a key component sourced from an unreliable supplier. To achieve supply resilience, the firm has an incentive to replace the unreliable supplier with product upgrading supported by R&D. It has an option to make high or low investments in R&D projects, indicating a high or low success rate. Our findings reveal that Firm 1 prefers to make investments in R&D for the upgraded product at a high investment level when the additional production cost of the upgraded product is relatively low or both the upgrading cost and supply disruption risk are relatively high. Extending our model to a duopoly scenario, we investigate the impact of competition on the product upgrading strategy selection. It is shown that a firm with a sufficiently large market share can drive its competitor out of the market by making R&D investments. Compared to the monopoly scenario, Firm 1 has a stronger incentive to upgrade the product under the duopoly scenario if its market share is relatively low. Finally, we identify the conditions where consumers get benefits from product upgrading. Our findings shed light on the importance of product upgrading strategy in a volatile business environment and provide insights into how firms can effectively mitigate supply disruption risk through R&D investments.

Based upon the resource-based view and national culture perspectives, this paper investigates the two-way relationship between R&D investment and company performance. We propose that company performance and R&D investment have mutual effects, and the magnitude of these mutual effects varies with different national cultures, different company rewarding systems, and different decision-making patterns of management teams. Related hypotheses are developed and tested on the data of the US and Taiwanese technology-intensive companies during 1998–2003, and are generally supported by the statistical results.

As the subject of pollutant emissions, enterprises play an important role in environmental governance and should consciously fulfil their environmental responsibility. So, can the enterprise perform environmental responsibility to increase their investment in research and development (R&D)? Based on the data from China’s Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed enterprises in 2011–2019, this paper explores the relationship between corporate environmental responsibility and R&D investment and examines the dual moderating effects of public attention and intellectual property protection. It is found that the implementation of corporate environmental responsibility can promote R&D investment. Public attention moderates the positive relationship between corporate environmental responsibility and R&D investment; it seeks that the positive relationship becomes higher with public attention. With higher regional intellectual property protection levels, the moderating effect of public attention on corporate environmental responsibility and R&D investment will be more obviously higher. This research provides theoretical support for enterprises to fulfil their environmental responsibilities and a new perspective for revealing the factors of enterprises’ R&D investment, which can offer a foundation for future research and practices.

The paper investigates the relationship between investment in research and development (R&D), innovation expenses, and productivity of manufacturing companies. These empirical results have shown that innovation investments (1) improve the performance of industrial companies with the elasticity of 0.09; (2) innovation investment has an impact on the performance of the company, and the extent of this impact depends on the value of R&D investment and has a range of elasticity ranging from 0.03 (for low volumes of R&D investment) to 0.16 in high volumes of R&D investment; (3) the relationship between innovation investment and the growth of performance is nonlinear in nature and has a strong positive relationship only after a critical mass of innovation investment has been reached; (4) a significant role in the relationship of innovation investment and productivity is played by the features of the industry in which the company operates (the companies that operate in high-tech industries not only invest more in R&D and innovation but also have a better performance due to research and development); (5) companies of low-tech industries have a negative elasticity of innovation investment and productivity, which is due to the influence of unprofitable innovation investments (appropriability effect), i.e. additional profits from the investment are not significant.

This study examines, through the theoretical lens of absorptive capacity, how the interaction between investments in R&D and training moderates the influence of collaboration with public research organisations (PROs) on firm innovation performance. Using data for 1,086 innovating firms across all industry sectors in the Australian state of Tasmania in 2010, we find that there is no direct association between collaboration with PROs and firm innovation performance, and the R&D-training interaction plays a significant role in positively moderating such an association. This study contributes to the innovation management literature by demonstrating the importance of the combination of R&D and training in creating absorptive capacity. More importantly, the combination of R&D and training positively influences the successful exploitation of private–public collaboration and promotes innovation performance.

Using a large sample of North American firms, from 1999 to 2016, we investigate the effect of corporate governance structures, specifically ownership, board characteristics, and executive compensation contracts on innovation intensity and output. We consider both R$\&$D expenditures and patents as innovation proxies and evaluate consequences of the economic downturns of 2000 and 2008. We find that R$\&$D investment increases with ownership by institutional blockholders and with the number of institutional owners, confirming the key role institutions play in innovation activities of firms. We observe higher R$\&$D levels for firms with more independent boards, more females board members and more outside directorships held by directors. We report that firms with CEO/chair of the board duality have lower R$\&$D intensity, as do firms with higher ownership by directors and with a higher mean board age. Innovation is negatively related to CEO salary levels, but positively related to the ratio of incentives to total compensation, confirming that incentives contribute to aligning shareholders and management interests, which leads to better long-term decisions. However, those incentives reduce the number of patents. We do not find any systematic changes in R$\&$D for the 2000 recession, however there is an increase for the 2008 financial crisis.

Few studies specifically testified to how increased bank competition affects export product quality. This paper fills this gap in this area by examining whether and how increased bank competition affects export product quality. The core results of our findings are as follows. First, the statistical analysis results show that a series of bank reforms have enhanced competition in the banking industry in China. Second, the theoretical model shows that bank reform positively influences export product quality. Subsequently, employing a panel sample of 77,817 firms that exported 4,787 products (HS-6) to 230 destinations from 2000 to 2006, we adopt a difference-in-differences approach to test the association between a rise in bank competition and the quality of exported products. The baseline results which are robust in different model settings support that an increase in bank competition increases export product quality. The further empirical test shows that increased bank competition upgrades export product quality through the following channels: bank competition increase leads to enterprises’ financial stability enhancement which, in turn, leads to R&D investment upgrading which then leads to export product quality enhancement. Finally, the heterogeneity checks documented that the positive effect of bank competition upgrading on export product quality is pronounced for non-SOEs, and for firms in both the growth and mature stages. Moreover, an increase in bank competition makes financial resources more accessible in areas with weak financial infrastructure. Our findings shed light on the policy implications for emerging economies. Our study expands the theoretical framework of bank competition research on export product quality and inspires the development of strategies for exporting enterprises.

This chapter aims to study the impact of R&D programs on economic growth. The long-run growth rate is fueled by R&D investment, and the government levies taxes on labor income and capital returns to finance this investment. The research investigates the interplay between R&D activity and the effects of tax policies. In particular, this study shows that a rise in R&D investment enhances the efficiency of unskilled labor so that income inequality between unskilled and skilled workers can be reduced, consequently increasing economic growth.

The paper investigates the relationship between investment in research and development (R&D), innovation expenses, and productivity of manufacturing companies. These empirical results have shown that innovation investments (1) improve the performance of industrial companies with the elasticity of 0.09; (2) innovation investment has an impact on the performance of the company, and the extent of this impact depends on the value of R&D investment and has a range of elasticity ranging from 0.03 (for low volumes of R&D investment) to 0.16 in high volumes of R&D investment; (3) the relationship between innovation investment and the growth of performance is nonlinear in nature and has a strong positive relationship only after a critical mass of innovation investment has been reached; (4) a significant role in the relationship of innovation investment and productivity is played by the features of the industry in which the company operates (the companies that operate in high-tech industries not only invest more in R&D and innovation but also have a better performance due to research and development); (5) companies of low-tech industries have a negative elasticity of innovation investment and productivity, which is due to the influence of unprofitable innovation investments (appropriability effect), i.e. additional profits from the investment are not significant.

This paper investigates the relationship between management over-optimism, corporate risk-taking, and R&D investment by using natural language processing technology. This paper uses Python 3.9 to extract the frequency of optimistic words to measure the emotion of management in the text. The results of the Stata 16.0 analysis indicate a significant positive correlation between management’s overly optimistic expectations and R&D investment and how corporate risk-taking mediates this relationship.

The main purposes of this paper are to study (1) a differential effect of inside debt on components of firm risk, and (2) how it relates to CEO portfolio diversification to reduce firm risk exposure. We find that compensating CEOs with inside debt (e.g., pensions and other deferred compensation plans) leads to reductions in firms’ systematic risk and idiosyncratic risk, but to disproportionate degrees. CEOs with larger inside debt draft and implement policies, which lead to a significantly larger reduction in the idiosyncratic firm risk and investment. We then show that the differential effect is the result of an asymmetry in CEOs’ perceived benefits of diversifying exposures to individual firm risk components. We further show that granting excessive debt-based pay may divert executives from firm specific but productive activities (e.g., R&D investments), therefore may compromise longrun corporate success.