 What's good for the goose ain't good for the gander: cock-eyed counterfactuals and the performance effects of R&DAlex Coad (alex.coad@gmail.com), Nanditha Mathew and Emanuele Pugliese LEM Papers Series from Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM), Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy Abstract: We investigate the effects of R&D investment on performance outcomes (sales growth and relative profitability) for Indian manufacturing firms. Previous research shows contradictory results - while some studies find a positive effect of R&D on firm performance, some find that firms investing in R&D do not perform significantly better, in some cases, even perform worse than their non-investing counterparts. We claim that the effects of R&D on performance are often mis-specified: The contradictory results are likely due to 1) inverse causality, i.e., firms invest in R&D as a function of sales growth and/or 2) a bias caused by censored data (i.e. R&D investment has a lower bound at zero). We apply endogenous switching regression to tackle the issue of selection and censored data, and the results we observe are sharp: firms investing in R&D would have had less growth and less relative profitability if they had not done so. Interestingly, firms that did not invest in R&D would not have benefited had they done so. Keywords: R&D investment; Firm performance; Endogenous switching (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ssa:lemwps:2017/21 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in LEM Papers Series from Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM), Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy Contact information at EDIRC. |
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