Mergers and Inventors' Productivity in the Pharmaceutical Industry

生产率是经济增长的主要动力，也是衡量一个国家竞争力的关键指标。在ESRC生产力洞察网络的启动仪式上，国际咨询委员会主席吉姆·奥尼尔勋爵表示：“提高生产率可以说是英国的核心经济挑战，但要实现这一点，我们需要更好地了解生产率的驱动因素和制约因素。”尽管不是所有影响生产率的因素都得到了很好的理解，但经济学家们一致认为，创新是生产率的主要决定因素之一。因此，了解市场结构和企业组织的变化如何影响创新，对于解开生产率难题的一个重要部分至关重要。最近在有关创新的经济辩论中，有一个问题占据了中心位置，那就是并购如何影响公司的研究努力和产出。欧盟委员会在最近的并购案件中采取的观点是，涉及集中化行业中高度创新的公司的并购可能会减少研发努力和创新。然而，最近的理论研究表明，并购可能会刺激或抑制创新，这取决于对研发技术的假设、并购产生的协同效应以及创新适用性的变化。因此，并购对创新有正面还是负面影响的问题归根结底是一个经验性的问题。不幸的是，现有的证据似乎也不是决定性的。因此，该项目的目的是就这一相关政策问题提供新的证据。虽然现有的大多数文献都是使用公司层面的数据来研究并购对创新的影响，但本项目的主要新颖性在于，我们将使用制药行业的专利数据来调查并购如何影响单个发明者的生产率。与公司级别的分析相比，在发明者级别使用数据至少有两个重要优势。首先，发明者级别的数据将使我们能够以更严格的方式识别并购对创新的因果效应。在这项研究中，我们将比较为合并公司工作的发明家和为未参与合并的公司工作的发明家的生产率，这些发明家的发明者数量异常庞大，直到合并之年，他们的研究成果非常相似。此外，发明者层面的生产率变化更容易衡量，因为个人与公司不同，不会在物理上合并成一个新的实体。其次，发明者水平的数据将使我们能够探索并购影响发明者生产率的机制，以及他们是否真的能像他们的支持者经常声称的那样，有利于科学家团队之间的知识协同效应。这个项目的一个具体目标是调查发明者的生产率是否随着他们研究团队的变化或研究计划的重叠程度而有系统地变化。选择制药行业来研究这些问题也带来了几个好处。首先，这是一个高度创新的行业，仅在英国就雇佣了7万多人。其次，目前活跃在市场上的大多数最大的制药公司在过去30年里参与了一次或多次并购。第三，专利提供了制药公司研究产出的准确衡量，因为它们是保护该行业创新的唯一有效方式，而其他行业可以依赖其他策略，如商业秘密。通过研究并购如何影响科学家的工作离职和合作者网络，进而影响他们的创新产出，这项研究将提供重要证据，为正在进行的竞争政策辩论提供信息，并提高我们对“商业环境”和“人”的理解，这两个支柱被英国政府确定为提高生产率所必需的五大支柱之一。

Productivity is a main driver of economic growth and a key indicator of a country's competitiveness. At the launch of the ESRC Productivity Insights Network, Lord Jim O'Neill, chair of the International Advisory Board, said that "raising productivity is arguably the central economic challenge in the UK, but to achieve this we need to better understand the drivers and inhibitors of productivity." Although not all the factors that influence productivity are well understood, there is consensus among economists that innovation is one of its main determinants. Understanding how changes in market structure and in firms' organization affect innovation is then vital to unlock an important piece of the productivity conundrum. One question that has recently gained central stage in the economic debate on innovation is how Mergers and Acquisitions (M&As) affect firms' research efforts and output. The view taken by the European Commission in recent merger cases is that M&As involving highly innovative companies in concentrated industries are likely to decrease R&D effort and innovation. However, recent theoretical studies show that M&As may spur or stifle innovation depending on the assumption made about the R&D technology, the synergies arising from the merger and changes in the appropriability of the innovation. The question whether M&As have a positive or a negative impact on innovation is therefore, ultimately, an empirical one. Unfortunately, the available evidence does not seem to be conclusive either. The aim of this project is then to provide fresh evidence on this relevant policy issue. While most of the existing literature has looked at the effect of M&As on innovation using firm-level data, the main novelty of this project is that we will investigate how M&As influence the productivity of individual inventors, using patent data in the Pharmaceutical Industry. The use of data at inventor level presents at least two important advantages compared to firm-level analysis. First, inventor-level data will allow us to identify the causal effect of M&As on innovation in a more rigorous way. In this study, we will compare the productivity of inventors that work for companies that merge to that of an unusually large pool of inventors that work for firms not involved in a merger and have very similar research output up to the year of the merger. Moreover, changes in productivity at inventor level are easier to measure because individuals, differently from firms, do not physically merge into a new entity. Second, inventor-level data will allow us to explore the mechanisms through which M&As affect inventors' productivity and whether they can truly favour knowledge synergies between teams of scientists, as their proponents often claim. One specific objective of this project is to investigate whether inventors' productivity varies systematically with changes in their research team or with the degree of overlapping in their research programs. The choice of the pharma industry to investigate these questions presents also several advantages. First, this is a highly innovative industry, employing more than 70,000 people in UK only. Second, most of the largest pharma companies currently active on the market have been involved in one or more M&As over the last three decades. Third, patents provide an accurate measure of the research output of pharma companies because they are the only effective way to protect innovation in this industry, whereas other sectors can rely on other strategies, such as trade secrecy.By studying how M&As affect scientists' job departure and network of collaborators and, in turn, their innovative output, this research will provide vital evidence to inform on-going debates in competition policy as well as to improve our understanding of "Business Environment" and "People", two of the five pillars identified by the UK government as necessary to increasing productivity.