ارتباطات علمی و بهره وری شرکت: شواهد پانل داده ها از شرکت های الکترونیک تایوانی  Scientific linkages and firm productivity: Panel data evidence from Taiwanese electronics firms

1. Introduction Knowledge is a public good, and it is likely that there are spillovers from academic science to commercial firms. Nelson (1986) survey research managers and find that university research is an important source ofinnovation in some industries. Jaffe (1989) and Adams (1990) show the importance of basic science for economic growth. Acs et al. (1992) find significant externalities from academic research on privative R&D and patenting (Cassiman et al., 2008). Mansfield (1991) and Cohen et al. (2002) also find that academic research is important for industrial innovation. Overall, findings by these studies show that knowledge spillovers from academia to industry have an impact on firms’ abilities to innovate. There are many examples of linkages between academic research and innovations by firms—university-industry collaboration (Zucker et al., 2002; Zucker and Darby, 2001), industry financing university research (OECD, 2004), university licensing (Thursby and Thursby, 2002), and citations to university patents (Trajtenberg et al., 1997), to name a few. An important example of spillovers from academic research to the private sector is the referencing of scientific papers by patents developed by firms (see Narin et al., 1997; and Hicks et al., 2001). For firms, academic research is a very important source of knowledge, a view also held by Jaffe et al. (2002). It leads firms into new areas of innovation and subsequently to new production processes and products. Additionally, academic science enables firms to circumvent needless experimentation. This, in turn, allows them to focus on only the most rewarding avenues of research. Branstetter and Ogura (2005) also indicate that basic science can open new research areas for applied researchers, as well as increase the level of applied research effort and its productivity. All these imply that the spillovers of knowledge from academic research lead to an increase in firms’ research productivity (Evenson and Kislev, 1976; Gambardella, 1992). There is a persistent rise in patents’ citations of academic publications. For instance, Narin et al. (1997) report a threefold increase in the number of citations of academic literature in industrial patents in the United States during the mid-1990s. They also point out that 73% of the scientific articles cited by industry patents were authored at academic, governmental, and other public institutions.1 Branstetter and Ogura (2005) show that there has been a rapid increase in citations of scientific articles in patents granted in the U.S. from the mid-1980s until the late 1990s. This increase is well above the increases in the U.S.’s R&D expenditure and the global output of scientific articles. Particularly, while the former increased by nearly 40% and the latter by 13%, scientific references of patent increased by more than 13-fold. This could mean that publicly funded science generated significant spillovers to industrial innovation during this period. Therefore, it would be interesting to see whether these knowledge spillovers from academia to the private sector bring about a contribution to firm productivity.