Industry Spillovers Effects on Productivity of Large International Firms

The aim of this paper is to explore the impact of intra- and inter-industry spillover components on productivity of large International firms. We use data from all EU R&D investment scoreboards editions issued every year until 2011 by the JRC-IPTS (scoreboards). The analysis is based upon a new dataset composed of 879 worldwide R&D-intensive manufacturing firms whose information has been collected for the period 2002-2010. Given the panel data structure of the sample, ad hoc econometric techniques that deal with both firm’s unobserved heterogeneity and weak exogeneity of the right hand-side variables are implemented. The main contribution to the literature is that of further investigating the industry spillovers at firm level within the Triad for a period of time that considers also the economic crisis. In order to measure the distribution of the firm’s research interests through the different technological areas, we use the patent distribution over technological sectors according to the International Patent Classification (IPC). The patent distribution relies on the whole number of patent applications filed to the European Patent Office until 2011. The empirical results suggest a significant impact of R&D spillover effects on firms’ productivity but the results are quite differentiated according to the spillover stock type and this may represent a relevant source of policy implications.