The causes of knowledge flows between multinational companies: Evidence from patent-citations

Abstract

Using firm level data on for instance the number of patents, the number of employees and the R&D budget, we are trying to identify the factors that play an important role in teh establishment of knowledge flows between multinational companies. We tested our hypotheses with a database constructed espcially for this reserach using regression analysis. It turns out that only the number of patents per firm, the R&D spending, the number of employees and the revenues of the firm play an important role. The number of alliances and the number of equity alliances play surprisingly not an important role. Further research on these variables is necessary.