Cohesion policy is the European Union's main instrument for reducing regional disparities, yet whether it builds the capacity of lagging regions to generate new knowledge remains poorly understood. The causal literature has measured income and growth rather than invention, and has treated absorptive capacity as a precondition for transfers to work rather than as something transfers might create. This paper asks whether cohesion funds build inventive capacity, and where. It applies the Callaway and Sant'Anna difference-in-differences estimator to European NUTS-3 regions from 2000 to 2022, taking European Patent Office applications by inventor region as the outcome and exploiting the 75% eligibility threshold. Eligibility raised patenting by around a fifth, but the effect became detectable only in the seventh year and accumulated thereafter; the same lag emerges independently in the following programming period. The return was concentrated among regions of the member states acceding in 2004 and 2007, where patenting roughly doubled, and was absent in the convergence regions of longer-standing member states however little they patented before. Cohesion funds build inventive capacity where the surrounding innovation system is under construction rather than where inventive output is low, so evaluations aligned with the seven-year programming cycle will systematically miss the effect.
This paper examines how relative-profit-performance (RPP) competition and emission-tax timing shape environmental R&D (ER&D) cooperation in a Cournot duopoly with knowledge spillovers. We compare non-cooperative and cooperative ER&D under committed and time-consistent emission taxes. Under committed tax, cooperation always raises ER&D investment and social welfare, although firms' private preference depends on competitive intensity and spillovers. Under time-consistent tax, cooperation serves as a credible commitment device and is always privately preferred. However, intense RPP competition combined with weak spillovers induces firms to use individual investment strategically to influence the subsequent tax, causing non-cooperative investment to exceed cooperative investment. Cooperation under time-consistent tax is therefore not necessarily welfare improving. These results reveal a policy-timing trade-off: the ER&D regime preferred by firms need not maximize welfare, and the benefits of cooperation depend jointly on competitive aggressiveness, knowledge spillovers, and regulatory commitment. Effective environmental policy should therefore be coordinated with the treatment of ER&D collaboration under antitrust policy.
This study hypothesises that non-resident patenting has important implications for the host country's technological and economic progress. Non-resident patents can facilitate the diffusion of new technologies and knowledge spillovers from inventors in patent applications, leading to innovation and productivity gains for the host country. We empirically examine the impact of non-resident patenting on the host country's R&D decision, R&D investment, resident patenting, and total factor productivity (TFP). Using the CDM approach with a sample of 188 countries over 2001-2019, and measuring patent activity in per-capita terms to ensure cross-country comparability, we find that non-resident patenting positively and significantly affects R&D intensity and TFP in High Income and Upper Middle-Income countries, while effects are statistically insignificant in the full sample and in the Lower Income countries. The income-group heterogeneity of these results emphasises that international knowledge spillovers are not automatic but depend critically on domestic absorptive capacity. The CDM framework allows us to jointly address selectivity and simultaneity, while interpreting R&D intensity as a country-level measure of absorptive capacity.
