“Are R&D collaborative agreements persistent at the firm level? Empirical evidence for the Spanish case”

We provide evidence on the dynamics in firms’ R&D cooperation behaviour. Our main objective is to analyse if R&D collaborative agreements are persistent at the firm level, and in such a case, to study what are the main drivers of this phenomenon. R&D cooperation activities at the firm level can be persistent due to true state dependence, this implying that cooperating in a given period enhances the probability of doing it in the subsequent period and it can also be a consequence of firms’ individual heterogeneity, so that certain firms have certain characteristics that make them more likely to carry out technological alliances. A second contribution of the paper deals with the differentiated persistence pattern of collaboration agreements for three different types of partners: customers and/or suppliers, competitors and institutions. We specifically explore the degree of the persistence in R&D collaborative activities when considering them separately as well as the possibility of finding crossed-persistence across these different partner types.