Productivity growth and R & D expenditure in UK manufacturing firms

Katharina Wakelin
Additional contact information
Katharina Wakelin: MERIT

No 12, Research Memorandum from Maastricht University, Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT)

Abstract: This paper analyses the relationship between productivity growth and R&D expenditure at the firm level. A Cobb-Douglas function is estimated for 170 UK quoted firms including R&D intensity as well as the capital to labour ratio. A positive and significant role is found for the firm’s own R&D expenditure in influencing productivity growth from 1988-1992; the relationship is no longer significant when sector fixed effects are included. To capture these sector effects, two spillover variables are included: the R&D expenditure of other firms in the same sector, and the weighted R&D expenditure of innovation-supplying industries. The former is found to play a large positive role in productivity growth, increasing it by around 1%, while no significant role is found for the latter. The variation in technological opportunity across sectors appears to play an important role in the efficacy of R&D expenditure.

Keywords: research and development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1997
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://unu-merit.nl/publications/rmpdf/removed.pdf (application/pdf)

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:unm:umamer:1997012

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Research Memorandum from Maastricht University, Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Leonne Portz ().