Intangible assets and productivity at the firm level: R&D versus non-R&D intangibles

Felix Roth and Christian Rammer

No 25-062, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: Intangible assets have increasingly been identified as a main source of productivity gains. Since the pioneering work by Corrado, Hulten, and Sichel (2005), empirical research has largely focused on macro and industry-level studies, while firm-level studies have often been confined to a limited set of intangible assets, especially Research and Development (R&D). This paper employs a unique firm-level panel database that contains information on four types of intangible assets: R&D, software & databases (S&D), firm-specific human capital (HC), and brand value (BV). For R&D, we find much lower productivity returns than for S&D and HC. R&D even loses significance once controlling for other intangibles, except for high-tech manufacturing. In contrast to R&D, we find that S&D and HC tend to be the primary drivers of productivity gains, particularly in services. Our findings have implications for research policy, suggesting a stronger focus on supporting investment in non-R&D intangibles, including S&D and HC.

Keywords: Non-R&D intangibles; productivity; R&D; digitalisation; firm-specific human capital; brand value; firm-level panel data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D24 E22 O33 O38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/333901/1/1945749075.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:zbw:zewdip:333901

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().