Innovation and productivity in knowledge intensive business services

This paper studies empirically the relationship between the sources of knowledge, innovation and productivity in Knowledge Intensive Business Services using French micro data and sheds some new light on the production of knowledge and on effects of innovative output on firm productivity. Both an innovation function and a production function augmented with dummy endogenous innovation are estimated. Three estimators which control for endogeneity of the dummy innovation are employed: the first is a maximum likelihood estimator of the equations’ system while the other two are built in the instrumental variables framework. These estimators give useful complementary information because of the usual efficiency-robustness tradeoff comparing system-equations and single-equation estimators. We find that innovation is frequent in Knowledge Intensive Business Services and has a strong and positive effect on productivity. As in manufacturing, the main determinant of innovation is formal knowledge resulting from R&D or from acquisitions of equipment, patents or licenses.