Learning and Productivity of Swedish Exporting Firms: The Importance of Innovation Efforts and the Geography of Innovation
25 Pages Posted: 18 Jan 2013
Date Written: January 14, 2013
Abstract
This paper is concerned with the productivity and growth of Swedish exporting firms. Using data on 9,580 manufacturing firms with 10 or more employees for the period 1997-2008, it estimates a dynamic GMM model that captures both the impact of recurrent knowledge investment through innovation and potential spillovers from the local milieu. The majority of the exporting firms are non-innovative. The data reveal that patent applicants located in knowledge intense milieus account for almost 40 percent of total Swedish exports, but only 2 percent of the firms. From the regressions it is shown that, relative to a firm that does not engage in innovation and has scarce access to external knowledge, the level of productivity is 2-12 percent higher for an innovative firm, depending on how innovation is defined and where the innovator is located. The annual long-run growth rate is 0.2-0.7 higher for innovative firms. Moreover, the performance gap between innovative and non-innovative exporters increases with accessibility to external knowledge for the former.
Keywords: Productivity, exports, innovation, geographical knowledge spillovers, panel data
JEL Classification: C23, F14, L25, O31, R32
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
Exports and Productivity: A Survey of the Evidence from Firm Level Data
-
Market Entry Costs, Producer Heterogeneity, and Export Dynamics
By Sanghamitra Das, Mark J. Roberts, ...
-
Firm Heterogeneity, Exporting and Foreign Direct Investment: A Survey
By Richard Kneller and David Greenaway
-
Participation in Export Markets and Productivity Performance in Canadian Manufacturing
By John R. Baldwin and Wulong Gu
-
Export Entry and Exit by German Firms
By Andrew B. Bernard and Joachim Wagner
-
Export Behavior and Productivity Growth: Evidence from Italian Manufacturing Firms