IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/jrp/jrpwrp/2008-050.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Productivity Impact of R&D Investment: Evidence from European Microdata

Author

Listed:
  • Raquel Ortega-Argiles

    (Joint Research Centre-European Commission, IPTS Seville)

  • Lesley Potters

    (Joint Research Centre-European Commission and Utrecht School of Economics)

  • Marco Vivarelli

    (Joint Research Centre-European Commission, Catholic University, Milan and Max Planck Institute of Economics, Jena)

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Raquel Ortega-Argiles & Lesley Potters & Marco Vivarelli, 2008. "The Productivity Impact of R&D Investment: Evidence from European Microdata," Jena Economics Research Papers 2008-050, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena.
    • Handle: RePEc:jrp:jrpwrp:2008-050
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://oweb.b67.uni-jena.de/Papers/jerp2008/wp_2008_050.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    R&D; productivity; knowledge stock; panel data; perpetual inventory method;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • O33 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:jrp:jrpwrp:2008-050. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Markus Pasche (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.jenecon.de .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.