Determinants of International Research Collaboration: Evidence from International Co-Inventions in Asia and Major OECD Countries

type="main"> International research collaboration has become important in recent years. This paper analyzes what gains drive the expansion of international research collaboration and what costs prevent it, with a special focus on the incidence of international co-inventions (ICIs) in Asia and major Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries. The major findings are as follows. ICIs become more prevalent in those technology sectors where scientific literature becomes important as prior art, inventor team size increases, and the relative inventor resources of the own country in the world declines. Thus, ICIs allow a country to exploit more efficiently the world stock of new knowledge and to realize the gains from combining diverse sources of knowledge and skills. Moreover, the results of estimating a gravity model centered on the USA and Great Britain suggest that language differences measured by Test of English as a Foreign Language scores matter significantly. The results also suggest that exporting from these two countries are significantly and positively associated with ICIs.