EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

IS CORPORATE R&D INVESTMENT IN HIGH‐TECH SECTORS MORE EFFECTIVE?

Raquel Ortega‐argilés, Mariacristina Piva, Lesley Potters and Marco Vivarelli ()
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Raquel Ortega Argilés

Contemporary Economic Policy, 2010, vol. 28, issue 3, 353-365

Abstract: This paper discusses the link between R&D and productivity across the European industrial and service sectors. The empirical analysis is based on both the European sectoral OECD data and on a unique micro‐longitudinal database consisting of 532 top European R&D investors. The main conclusions are as follows. First, the R&D stock has a significant positive impact on labor productivity; this general result is largely consistent with previous literature in terms of the sign, the significance, and the magnitude of the estimated coefficients. More interestingly, both at sectoral and firm levels the R&D coefficient increases monotonically (both in significance and magnitude) when we move from the low‐tech to the medium‐ and high‐tech sectors. This outcome means that corporate R&D investment is more effective in the high‐tech sectors and this may need to be taken into account when designing policy instruments (subsidies, fiscal incentives, etc.) in support of private R&D. However, R&D investment is not the sole source of productivity gains; technological change embodied in gross investment is of comparable importance on aggregate and is the main determinant of productivity increase in the low‐tech sectors. Hence, an economic policy aiming to increase productivity in the low‐tech sectors should support overall capital formation.

Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (35)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1465-7287.2009.00186.x

Related works:
Working Paper: Is Corporate R&D Investment in High-Tech Sectors More Effective? (2009) Downloads
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:bla:coecpo:v:28:y:2010:i:3:p:353-365

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://ordering.onl ... 5-7287&ref=1465-7287

Access Statistics for this article

Contemporary Economic Policy is currently edited by Brad R. Humphreys

More articles in Contemporary Economic Policy from Western Economic Association International Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-24
Handle: RePEc:bla:coecpo:v:28:y:2010:i:3:p:353-365