Essay in Empirical Economics: Intangible Economy, Innovative Firms and Institution of Innovation

The present thesis is made up by three separate chapters covering topics related to international trade, intellectual property right, business groups and knowledge flows and finally, an attempt to identify promising and innovative young firms. The first paper focuses on the role of institutions, and it shows howdifferent types of institutions are important to determine comparative advantage for countries at different stage of development. The papers finds that intellectual property rights (IPR) protection changes export composition of OECD countries toward IP-intensive sectors, whereas contract enforcement is a driver of export of relation-specific inputs in non-OECD countries. However, better IPR quality encourages technology transfer by redirecting non-OECD imports toward IP-intensive industries. The second chapter studies how subsidiaries of Business Groups interact between each other. In particular, the paper highlights productivity gains that affiliates enjoy from intangible assets developed by other firms within the same group. The analysis shows that a key element to consider in order to understand these flows, is to take into account the hierarchical links between subsidiaries. This crucial step allows to show that within Business Groups knowledge flows upwards, i.e. subsidiaries in lower layers share their knowledge to subsidiaries in upper layers. The third chapter presents a novel dataset assembled during my experience at the OECD on innovative start-up. Combining information from two different data provider, Crunchbase and Dealroom, and implementing several cleaning and matching procedure, we managed to gather this dataset which covers almost the universe of innovative start-ups all over the world. This data are a key element that will be exploited in several work at the OECD, for example to study the determinants of start-ups success (innovation, scale-up) and how relevant are Killer Acquisitions in start-ups.