Investments in R&D activities are essential to firms. Decisions to increase or decrease R&D investments may rely according to changes in macroeconomic factors. The purpose of this paper is: to examine how firms in the industries; manufacturing computers, electronics and optics and manufacturing electrical equipment, have increased or decreased their R&D investments, in conjunction with macro factors during the 2000s. The sample is 49 Swedish firms. This paper is based on quantitative firm-level panel data on R&D activity investments and aggregated quantitative macro-level data on macro factors. The firm-level panel data set has been put together completely from scratch, using collected and transformed raw data. Using a logistic regression model, the results show that macro factors do affect R&D investments on a micro-level, to some extent. Further, the results show that change in macro factors does to a greater extent, affect decreases in R&D investments than increases in R&D investments. The process of increase and decrease of R&D investment should be considered as two different dynamic processes. Increase and decrease do not follow the same pattern, thus a decrease of R&D investments is a more explicit decision than a decision to increase R&D investments.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:sh-19610 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Gardell, Pierre |
| Publisher | Södertörns högskola, Institutionen för samhällsvetenskaper |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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