Technological competition, economic performance and strategic behaviour of international firms

This paper analyses the relationship between R&D rivalry, spillovers and productivity at the firm level. A particular attention is put on the way technological spillovers are formalised. The analysis is based upon a data set composed of 625 world-wide R&D-intensive manufacturing firms whose information has been collected for the period 1987-1994. Given the panel data structure of the sample, econometric techniques which deal with both firm's unobserved heterogeneity and weak exogeneity of the right hand-side variables are implemented. The R&D reaction patterns for the main R&D-intensive industries show that if firms are to different degrees sensitive to what competitors allocate to their activities, the behaviours are not homogeneous across industries and among countries. The empirical results give clue that spillover effects influence significantly firm's productivity. Nevertheless the effects differ substantially among the pillars of the Triad. The United States are mainly sensitive to their national stock of spillovers while Japan appears to draw from the international stock. On its side, Europe shows some pains to internalise spillovers.