The role of business visits in fostering R&D investment

The role of business visits in fostering R&D investment

Labor mobility is considered a powerful channel to acquire external knowledge and trigger complementarities in the innovation and R&D investment strategies; however, the extant literature has focused on either scientists’ mobility or migration of high-skilled workers, while virtually no attention has been devoted to the possible role of short-term business visits.

Using a unique and novel database originating a country/sector unbalanced panel over the period 1998-2019 (for a total of 8,316 longitudinal observations), this paper aims to fill this gap by testing the impact of BVs on R&D investment. Results from GMM-SYS estimates show that short-term mobility positively and significantly affects R&D investments; moreover, our findings indicate - as expected - that the beneficial impact of BVs is particularly significant in less innovative countries and in less innovative industries. These outcomes justify some form of support for BVs within the portfolio of the effective innovation policies, both at the national and local level.

About the Speaker

Prof Marco Vivarelli is member of the Scientific Executive Board of the Eurasia Business and Economics Society (EBES) in Istanbul and serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO) in Vienna. He has been scientific consultant for international organizations such as the International Labour Office, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, and the European Commission.

He is Editor-in-Chief of the Eurasian Business Review, Editor of Small Business Economics, co-Editor of Economics: The Open-Access, Open-Assessment Journal, Associate Editor of Economics of Innovation and New Technology, Associate Editor of Industrial and Corporate Change. He also serves on the editorial boards of the International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal, the Journal of Industrial and Business Economics, the Italian Economic Journaland the Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali- Research In Social Sciences. Together with his main affiliation with the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, he has secondary affiliations including a Professorial Fellowship at UNU-MERIT in Maastricht, a Research Fellowship at the Institute of Labor Economics(IZA) in Bonn, and a Fellowship at the Global Labor Organization (GLO).

Throughout his career, he has held various appointments, including honorary and visiting professorships at institutions like SPRU-University of Sussex (2010-2013), the University of Warwick (2005-2012), and the Max Planck Institute of Economics in Jena (2004-2009). He has also served as a senior scientist at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Seville (2007-2009) and as a senior research economist at the International Labour Office in Geneva (2002-2005).

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