Technological spillovers from multinational firms

Andrés Barge-Gil, Alberto López and Ramón Núñez-Sánchez

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper is aims to identify genuine technological spillovers from multinational firms (MNEs). To this end, we use data on R&D from MNEs to measure spillovers, while most of the existing literature uses output to measure the foreign presence in an industry (what we call output-based spillovers). In line with the existing literature, we distinguish between horizontal spillovers (i.e., intra-industry linkages) and vertical spillovers (i.e., backward –or downstream– and forward –or upstream– inter-industry linkages). Our results show that the three types of technological spillovers from MNEs are positive, with the horizontal spillovers the larger ones, followed by backward spillovers. The effect of forward spillovers is much smaller in magnitude. Moreover, we find that not controlling for industry size (i.e., technological spillovers from all firms in an industry) leads to underestimating both horizontal and backward spillovers from MNEs, and to overestimating forward spillovers from MNEs. Finally, we find that the distinction between technological and output-based spillovers is of great relevance. The size of backward technological spillovers is approximately 44% of the size of output-based backward spillovers, while for horizontal spillovers both types of spillovers are quite similar. Importantly, output-based forward spillovers are negative while technological forward spillovers are positive.

Keywords: technological spillovers; multinational firms; productivity; R&D (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F23 L53 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-10-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ind and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Technological spillovers from multinational firms (2020)
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