Evidence on the impact of R&D and ICT investment on innovation and productivity in Italian firms

Bronwyn Hall, Francesca Lotti and Jacques Mairesse

No 874, Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area

Abstract: The paper investigates R&D and ICT investment at firm level, assessing their relative importance and the extent to which they are complements or substitutes. We use data on a large unbalanced panel sample from four consecutive waves of a survey of Italian manufacturing firms, together with a version of the model developed by Crepon et al., 1998, modified to include ICT investment and R&D as the two main inputs of innovation and productivity. We find that R&D and ICT are both strongly associated with innovation and productivity, with R&D being more important for innovation and ICT for productivity. We explore their possible complementarity in innovation and production but find none, although there is complementarity between R&D and worker skill in innovation.

Keywords: R&D; ICT; innovation; productivity; complementarity; Italy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L60 O31 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-eff, nep-ict, nep-ino, nep-knm, nep-sbm and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (34)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/temi-disc ... 0874/en_tema_874.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Evidence on the impact of R&D and ICT investments on innovation and productivity in Italian firms (2013)
Working Paper: Evidence on the Impact of R&D and ICT Investment on Innovation and Productivity in Italian Firms (2012)
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:bdi:wptemi:td_874_12

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().