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The autonomous governments of two regions in Spain established mobile bans in schools as of the year 2015. Exploiting the across-region variation introduced by such a quasi-natural experiment, this study aims to perform a comparative-case analysis to investigate the impact of this non-spending-based policy on regional Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores in maths and sciences and bullying incidence.

The authors apply the synthetic control method and diff-in-diff estimation to compare the treated regions with the rest of regions in Spain before and after the intervention.

The results show noticeable reductions of bullying incidence among teenagers in the two treated regions. The authors also find positive and significant effects of this policy on the PISA scores of the Galicia region that are equivalent to 0.6–0.8 years of learning in maths and around 0.72 to near one year of learning in sciences.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first empirical study analysing the impact of mobile phone bans in schools on bullying cases, exploiting variation across regions (or other units), years and age intervals. Besides, the scarce formal evidence that exists on the consequences of the mobile phones use in students’ academic achievement comes from a micro perspective, while the paper serves as one more piece of evidence from a macro perspective.

A firm will seek an optimal balance between internal R&D and technology outsourcing when formulating its innovation strategy. This paper aims to provide a review of the determinants of firm's innovation strategy, and performs an empirical study on a sample from Chinese high‐tech industry, with the purpose of identifying two aspects of the issue: the choice patterns of Chinese firms over innovation strategy, and the innovation effect elasticity of different strategies.

The development of a multiple regression model supported by data from industry level and a statistic analysis.

Outsourcing is the major innovation strategy adopted by most Chinese high‐tech firms, especially technology import, which implies the imperfection of Chinese innovation service system. The empirical analysis also indicates the insufficiency of internal R&D expenditure and the weakness of absorptive capacity in Chinese high‐tech firms. Although, Chinese high‐tech firms prefer the outsourcing strategy in their innovation, the contribution of outsourcing is much smaller than that of internal R&D. When expenditures are increased by the same rate, the innovation output form internal R&D is twice the output of outsourcing. For improving Chinese firms' innovation efficiency, the reform of innovation service system is needed on the macro‐level, while on the micro‐level, it calls for firms to readjust their innovation strategy portfolio.

This paper will make up for the deficiency in current researches on innovation, which often apply firm samples in developed countries, and lack evidences from firm samples in developing countries. In addition, it will provide the decision‐making basis for Chinese Government's current actions in constructing and improving China's innovation service system.