Although joint R&D activities among firms are encouraged
everywhere today, the same old suspicion still lingers:
does cooperation in R&D facilitate product market
collusion? Though there is a body of theoretical
literature on research joint venture (RJV) participation
facilitating collusion, empirical tests are rare. Even
more so, there are few empirical tests on the general
theme of collusion. This note tries to fill this gap by
assuming a correspondence between the stability of
research joint ventures and collusion. By using data
from the U.S. National Cooperation Research Act, we show
that large RJVs in concentrated industries are more
stable and hence more suspect to collusion. pdf 2008