Estimating Dynamic R&D Demand: An Analysis of Costs and Long-Run Benefits
Mark J. Roberts (Pennsylvania State University, United States)

Using firm-level data from the German manufacturing sector, we estimate a dynamic, structural model of the firm’s decision to invest in R&D and quantify the cost and long-run benefit of this investment. The model incorporates and quantifies linkages between the firm’s R&D investment, product and process innovations, and future productivity and profits. The dynamic model provides a natural measure of the long-run payoff to R&D as the difference in expected firm value generated by the R&D investment. For the median productivity firm, investment in R&D raises firm value by 3.0 percent in a group of high-tech industries but only 0.2 percent in low-tech industries. Simulations of the model show that cost subsidies for R&D can significantly affect R&D investment rates and productivity changes in the high-tech industries. Joint with Bettina Peters, Van Anh Vuong, and Helmut Fryges.

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Allocation of human capital and innovation at the frontier: Firm-level evidence on Germany and the Netherlands.
Sabien Dobbelaere (VU University Amsterdam)

This paper examines how productivity effects of human capital and innovation vary at different points of the conditional productivity distribution. Our analysis draws upon two large unbalanced panels of 6,634 enterprises in Germany and 14,586 enterprises in the Netherlands over the period 2000-2008, considering 5 manufacturing and services industries that differ in the level of technological intensity. Industries in the Netherlands are characterized by a larger average proportion of high-skilled employees and industries in Germany by a more unequal distribution of human capital intensity. Except for low-technology manufacturing, average innovation performance is higher in all industries in Germany and the innovation performance distributions are more dispersed in the Netherlands. In both countries, we observe non-linearities in the productivity effects of investing in product innovation in the majority of industries. Frontier firms enjoy the highest returns to product innovation whereas the most negative returns to process innovation are observed in the best-performing enterprises of most industries. In both countries, we find that the returns to human capital increase with proximity to the technological frontier in industries with a low level of technological intensity. Strikingly, a negative complementarity effect between human capital and proximity to the technological frontier is observed in knowledge-intensive services, which is most pronounced for the Netherlands. Suggestive evidence for the latter points to a winner-takes-all interpretation of this finding. Joint with Eric Bartelsman and Bettina Peters.