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重要指标。在ESRC生产力洞察网络的发布会上，国际咨询委员会主席Jim O'Neill勋爵表示：“提高生产力可以说是英国的核心经济挑战，但为了实现这一目标，我们需要更好地了解生产力的驱动因素和抑制因素。”尽管并非所有影响生产率的因素都被很好地理解，但经济学家一致认为，创新是生产率的主要决定因素之一。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（m&a）如何影响企业的研究努力和产出。欧盟委员会（European Commission）在最近的并购案例中所持的观点是，涉及集中行业中高度创新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，并购是否会刺激或抑制创新，取决于对研发技术的假设、并购产生的协同效应以及创新可占有性的变化。因此，并购对创新的影响是积极的还是消极的，这个问题最终是一个实证问题。不幸的是，现有的证据似乎也不是结论性的。这个项目的目的是为这个相关的政策问题提供新的证据。虽然大多数现有文献都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之处在于，我们将使用制药行业的专利数据来研究并购如何影响个体发明家的生产力。与公司层面的分析相比，在发明者层面使用数据至少有两个重要的优势。首先，发明人级别的数据将使我们能够以更严格的方式确定并购对创新的因果关系。在这项研究中，我们将比较为合并公司工作的发明人的生产力，与为未参与合并的公司工作的大量发明人的生产力，这些发明人在合并当年具有非常相似的研究产出。此外，发明人水平上的生产率变化更容易衡量，因为不同于公司，个人并不会在物理上合并成一个新的实体。其次，发明人层面的数据将使我们能够探索并购影响发明人生产力的机制，以及它们是否真的像其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。该项目的一个具体目标是调查发明人的生产力是否随其研究团队的变化或其研究计划的重叠程度而系统性地变化。选择制药行业来调查这些问题也有几个优势。首先，这是一个高度创新的行业，仅在英国就雇佣了7万多名员工。其次，在过去30年里，目前活跃在市场上的大多数大型制药公司都参与了一次或多次并购。第三，专利为制药公司的研究产出提供了一个准确的衡量标准，因为它们是保护该行业创新的唯一有效方式，而其他部门可以依靠其他策略，如商业保密。通过研究并购如何影响科学家的离职和合作者网络，进而影响他们的创新产出，这项研究将为竞争政策的持续辩论提供重要证据，并提高我们对“商业环境”和“人”的理解，这是英国政府确定的提高生产力所必需的五大支柱中的两个。

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.