Ownership structure and firm patenting activity in Italy

This paper sheds light on firm-level heterogeneity in patent propensity by studying the relationship between ownership structure and patenting activity in Italian manufacturing firms from 2006 to 2013. Both patent and accounting data are extracted from the Bureau van Dijk’s Orbis database. Our empirical findings show that ownership concentration increases the probability of successful patent applications, but at decreasing returns to scale. Moreover, there is a close association between several firm-level dimensions and innovative performance. Some differences arise when large firms and SMEs are examined separately, but the analysis as a whole would confirm the importance of ownership concentration for patenting activity. The empirical results hold also when the analysis explicitly deals with the endogeneity problem.