%0 Report
        %A Kumbhakar, Subal C.
%A Ortega-Argilés, Raquel
%A Potters, Lesley
%A Vivarelli, Marco
%A Voigt, Peter
        %T Corporate R&D and Firm Efficiency: Evidence from Europe’s Top R&D Investors
        %D 2009
        %8 2009 Dec
        %I Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        %C Bonn
        %7 IZA Discussion Paper
        %N 4657
        %U https://www.iza.org/publications/dp4657
        %X The main objective of this study is to investigate the impact of corporate R&D activities on firms' performance, measured by labour productivity. To this end, the stochastic frontier technique is applied, basing the analysis on a unique unbalanced longitudinal dataset consisting of 532 top European R&D investors over the period 2000–2005. R&D stocks are considered as pivotal input in order to control for their particular contribution to firm-level efficiency. Conceptually, the study quantifies the technical inefficiency of a given company and tests empirically whether R&D activities could explain the distance from the efficient boundary of the production possibility set, i.e. the production frontier. From a policy perspective, the results of this study suggest that – if the aim is to leverage companies' productivity – emphasis should be put on supporting corporate R&D in high-tech sectors and, to some extent, in medium-tech sectors. By contrast, supporting corporate R&D in the low-tech sector turns out to have a minor effect. Instead, encouraging investment in fixed assets appears vital for the productivity of low-tech industries. However, with regard to firms' technical efficiency, R&D matters for all industries (unlike capital intensity). Hence, the allocation of support for corporate R&D seems to be as important as its overall increase and an 'erga omnes' approach across all sectors appears inappropriate.
        %K corporate R&D
%K stochastic frontier analysis
%K technical efficiency
%K productivity