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Whos doing who? Growth of sales, employment, assets, profits and R&D entangled in a curious five-way love triangle

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Abstract

Understanding causal relationships among key economic variables is crucial for policy makers, who wish to e.g. stimulate private R&D growth. To this end, we applied a technique recently imported from the Machine Learning community (Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVARs) identified using Independent Components Analysis (ICA)) to a set of the worlds largest R&D investors. Our analysis highlights the key role of sales growth, rather than profits growth, in stimulating R&D growth. R&D growth appears at the end of the causal ordering of the growth process. Our results suggest that policies to increase private R&D would do better to target sales rather than profits.

Suggested Citation

  • Alexander Coad & Nicola Grassano, 2016. "Whos doing who? Growth of sales, employment, assets, profits and R&D entangled in a curious five-way love triangle," JRC Working Papers on Corporate R&D and Innovation 2016-03, Joint Research Centre.
    • Handle: RePEc:ipt:wpaper:201603
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    Cited by:

    1. Rabinovich, Joel, 2023. "Tangible and intangible investments and sales growth of US firms," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 66(C), pages 200-212.
    2. Marta Postu?a & Wojciech Chmielewski, 2019. "The Impact of Intangible Assets and R&D Expenditure on the Market Capitalization and EBITDA of Selected ICT Sector Enterprises in the European Union," International Journal of Economics and Finance, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 11(8), pages 117-117, August.
    3. Joel Rabinovich, 2022. "The evolving contribution of R&D, advertising and capital expenditures for US-listed firms’ growth in sales, 1979-2018. A quantile regression analysis," Working Papers hal-03539656, HAL.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    R&D investment; firm growth; SVAR; sales growth; industrial dynamics;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L25 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Firm Performance
    • O30 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - General

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