Upstream product market regulations, ICT, R&D and productivity

Our study aims at assessing the actual importance of the two main channels usually contemplated in the literature through which upstream sector anticompetitive regulations may impact productivity growth: business investments in R&D and in ICT. We thus precisely try to estimate what are the specific impacts of these two channels and their shares in total impact as against alternative channels of investments in other forms of intangible capital such as improvements in skills, management and organization. For this, we specify an extended production function relating productivity explicitly to R&D and ICT capital as well as to upstream regulations, and two factor demand functions relating R&D and ICT capital to upstream regulations. These relations are estimated on a panel of 14 OECD countries and 13 industries over the period 1987-2007. Our estimates confirm the results of previous similar studies finding that the impact of upstream regulations on total factor productivity can be sizeable, and they provide evidence that a good part of the total impact, though not a predominant one, goes through both investments in ICT and R&D, and particularly the latter.