Knowledge spillovers: Intellectual property rights, direct investment, and industry-university research relationships

The purpose of this dissertation is to present new findings concerning spillovers of technological knowledge. The topics taken up for investigation can be divided broadly into two sets. First, I studied the effects of intellectual property rights protection on foreign direct investment. There has been little systematic, empirical evidence on this issue. To help fill this gap, an attempt is made to determine whether the extent of U.S. direct investment in developing countries is related to the perceived strength of intellectual property rights protection. Also, I carried out a statistical analysis of data on the composition of foreign direct investment obtained from fourteen U.S. chemical firms. The results provide statistically significant evidence that when other relevant factors are held equal, foreign direct investment tends to be more likely to go to countries where intellectual property rights protection is relatively strong, and foreign direct investment tends to be more likely to be made in facilities to manufacture components or complete products or in R&D facilities rather than in sales and distribution outlets or in rudimentary production and assembly facilities where intellectual property rights protection is relatively strong. Second, I studied industrial support for academic research. The results of a survey of nine major U.S. firms in the chemical, pharmaceutical, petroleum, and information processing industries (pertaining to 20 types of academic research) indicate that when firms choose universities to perform R&D for them, they tend to pay attention to geographical proximity. Also, the statistical results provide evidence that for research where firms are more likely to insist (in choosing universities) on a very high level of faculty quality, they tend to pay less attention to location of universities