R&D and Productivity: Testing Sectoral Peculiarities Using Micro Data

Lesley Potters, Raquel Ortega-Argiles and Marco Vivarelli ()

No 3338, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between a firm's R&D activities and its productivity using a unique micro data panel dataset and looking at sectoral peculiarities which may emerge; more specifically, we used an unbalanced longitudinal database consisting of 532 top European R&D investors over the six-year period 2000-2005. Our main findings can be summarised along the following lines: knowledge stock has a significant positive impact on a firm's productivity, with an overall elasticity of about 0.125; this general result is largely consistent with previous literature in terms of the sign, the significance and the estimated magnitude of the relevant coefficient. More interestingly, the coefficient increases monotonically when we move from the low-tech to the medium-high and high-tech sectors, ranging from a minimum of 0.05/0.07 to a maximum of 0.16/0.18. This outcome, in contrast with recently-renewed acceptance of low-tech sectors as a preferred target of R&D investment, suggests that firms in high-tech sectors are still far ahead in terms of the impact on productivity of their R&D investments, at least as regards top European R&D investors.

Keywords: knowledge stock; panel data; productivity; perpetual inventory method; R&D (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2008-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff, nep-ino, nep-knm and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Published - published in: Empirical Economics, 2011, 41 (3), 817-839

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp3338.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: R&D and productivity: testing sectoral peculiarities using micro data (2011)
Working Paper: R&D and Productivity: Testing Sectoral Peculiarities Using Micro Data (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp3338

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().