Synergistic effects of in-house and contracted R&D on export performance: evidence from China

ABSTRACT

We explored the synergistic benefits between internal and external R&D investments and between R&D and new products to export performance. The empirical results confirm the synergistic effects of innovation activities on export propensity but not on export intensity.

KEYWORDS:

• R&D
• innovation
• export performance
• China

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• F14
• L25
• O3

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The Poisson model is based on equality of the conditional variance and mean, which makes it more restrictive. However, the robust standard errors can mitigate the consequences of violating the restrictive distribution assumption (Cameron and Trivedi 2005). We estimated the hurdle model with the Poisson distribution and confirmed the robustness of our empirical findings (results are available upon request).

² Innovation and export performance are potentially confounding factors. However, innovative activities are measured as inputs/outputs over the last three years. They are dummy rather than numeric variables and are hardly determined by export propensity or, especially, numeric export share. We must nevertheless accede that the lack of intuitively compelling instruments prevents from testing causality from export performance to innovation.