EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The role of R&D and knowledge spillovers in innovation and productivity

David B. Audretsch and Maksim Belitski

European Economic Review, 2020, vol. 123, issue C

Abstract: The use of both research and development (R&D) and knowledge spillovers has been identified as the source of relative innovation underperformance in Europe vis-à-vis the United States. In this paper, we investigate R&D and knowledge spillovers at the firm level to evaluate the extent to which they complement innovation and firm productivity. We use data on a large unbalanced panel of 9213 UK firms constructed from six consecutive waves of a community innovation survey, an annual business registry survey and a business enterprise research and development survey during 2002–2014. We estimate the knowledge spillover-augmented version of the CDM model of R&D, innovation, and productivity to find that complementarities between R&D and knowledge spillovers are strongly associated with firm productivity rather than firm innovation. R&D is important for both innovation and productivity, while knowledge spillovers are more important than R&D for firm productivity. We also explore the differences between returns to R&D and knowledge spillovers across three distinctive innovation strategies.

Keywords: R&D; Innovation; Productivity; Knowledge collaboration; Knowledge spillover (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D24 O31 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (63)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292120300234
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:eecrev:v:123:y:2020:i:c:s0014292120300234

DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2020.103391

Access Statistics for this article

European Economic Review is currently edited by T.S. Eicher, A. Imrohoroglu, E. Leeper, J. Oechssler and M. Pesendorfer

More articles in European Economic Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:eee:eecrev:v:123:y:2020:i:c:s0014292120300234