TY  - JOUR
AU  - Mairesse,Jacques
AU  - Hall,Bronwyn H.
TI  - Estimating the Productivity of Research and Development: An Exploration of GMM Methods Using Data on French & United States Manufacturing Firms
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 5501
PY  - 1996
Y2  - March 1996
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5501
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5501.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Jacques Mairesse
CREST-INSEE
15, Boulevard Gabriel PERI
92245 MALAKOFF CEDEX
FRANCE
Tel: 33-1-41-17-35-50
Fax: 33-1-41-17-76-34
E-Mail: mairesse@ensae.fr

Bronwyn H. Hall
Dept. of Economics
549 Evans Hall
UC Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
Tel: 510/642-3878
Fax: 510/548-5561
E-Mail: bhhall@nber.org
AB  - A comparative study of the contribution of R&D to firm-level productivity in French and United States manufacturing firms in the 1980s is presented.  The study uses two large panels of approximately 1000 manufacturing firms covering over half of all R&D spending in each country and focuses on the estimation and interpretation of the relationship between output growth and the growth of R&D investment in the presence of simultaneity and firm heterogeneity.  We use GMM methods to control for both sources of estimation bias, and we find 1) overall, the contribution of R&D to sales productivity growth appears to have declined during the 1980s, and 2) the role of simultaneity bias is higher in the U.S. than in France, possibly reflecting the greater importance of liquidity constraints for R&D investment in that country.
ER  -