D22 - Firm Behavior: Empirical AnalysisReturn

Based on data for cities and enterprises in China from 2009 to 2020, we examine the effect of urban greening construction on corporate technological innovation. Urban greening con-struction has a pronounced promoting effect on the technological innovation of enterprises, which is more significant among enterprises in the Eastern Region, enterprises in heavily polluting industries and state-owned enterprises. However, urban greening construction only has a significant promoting effect on enterprise invention and green patent applications and has no significant promoting effect on utility models and design patent applications. In addition, urban greening construction mainly enhances enterprise technological innovation by strengthening enterprise environmental responsibility undertaking, enhancing urban human capital density, and improving urban air quality. Promoting the urban marketability process can significantly enhance the role of urban greening construction in enterprise technological innovation.

What type of R&D is essential for creating innovations? Is in-house R&D more efficient than purchasing external innovations? The question of various strategies for private firms to succeed in developing innovations is key for ongoing national and international programmes for raising innovativeness of economies. The goal of the paper is to investigate the outcomes of different types of R&D in the context of innovations and to analyse their significance in European countries empirically. In this paper, we aim to provide a quantitative analysis of the problem on the data collected from the Common Innovation Survey. We cover innovations in products, services, production methods, distribution systems and supporting activities. The results suggest that both in-house and external R&D matter for firms' innovativeness, but the effect is stronger for the former for most of the types of innovations considered.

The behavioral theory of the firm assumes that firms react on performance feedback by increasing their search for alternative courses of action. However, the empirical literature is full of contradictory findings. This paper puts forward the idea that at least part of these contradictions can be explained if we can identify groups of firms behaving differently from firms in other groups and theoretical propositions. The paper uses exploratory analysis of US and German industrial firms and changes in R&D expense as their response to financial performance feedback. The cluster analysis of behavioural patterns of these firms results in identifying several behaviourally distinctive groups. The findings support the idea that contradictions in previous studies may partially stem from having a different mix of heterogeneously behaving firms. Also, they point to the proposition that for further understanding of responses to performance feedback, these groups of firms should be analysed separately.