Collaborate or Consolidate? An NLP Text-Mining Analysis of R&D Networks and M&A - Professor Gordon Philips

Event Date: 22 April 2026

Speaker: Professor Gordon Philips, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth

Venue: Strathclyde Business School, Cathedral Wing, CW408 

Time: 2pm

Abstract:

We analyze firm decisions to enter into R&D collaborations as an alternative to purchasing firms through M&A. We analyze these endogenous decisions using a novel dataset of R&D collaborations between firms constructed using text mining over 1.5 million candidate news articles and using the RoBERTa transformer model to classify collaborations. The comprehensiveness of our data allows us to document differences in R&D collaboration activities across firm characteristics, industries, countries, or regions and how these differences change over time. We estimate a structural model capturing the joint endogeneity of both R&D collaborations and M&A activities to identify technology spillovers and market competition effects in firm performance. Our results indicate that the changing pattern in technology spillovers is due to firms substituting R&D collaborations with M&A, emphasizing the close connection between R&D collaborations and M&A activities.

Published: 9 April 2026