Business Visits, Knowledge Diffusion and Productivity

Mariacristina Piva, Max Tani and Marco Vivarelli ()

No 10421, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to investigate the productivity impact of business visits, relative to traditional drivers of productivity enhancement, namely capital formation and R&D. To carry out the analysis, we combine unique and novel data on business visits sourced from the U.S. National Business Travel Association with OECD data on R&D and capital formation. The resulting unbalanced panel covers on average 16 sectors per year in 10 countries during the period 1998-2011 (2,262 observations). Our results suggest that mobility through business visits is an effective mechanism to improve productivity. The estimated effect is about half as large as investing in R&D, supporting viewing business visits as a form of long-term investment rather than pure consumption expenditure. In a nutshell, our outcomes support the need to recognize the private and social value of business mobility.

Keywords: business visits; labour mobility; knowledge; R&D; productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2016-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff, nep-ino, nep-knm, nep-tid and nep-ure
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Published - published in: Journal of Population Economics, 2018, 31, 1321-1338

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Journal Article: Business visits, knowledge diffusion and productivity (2018)
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