The Relationships Among Firm Size, Innovation Type, and Export Performance With Regard to Time Spans

Abstract

We use the Korean Innovation Survey (KIS) data from 2005, 2008, and 2010 to estimate the relationship between firm size, innovation type, and export performance with different time spans. Following a review of the literature, we hypothesize that the effect of innovation activities on export performance would be revealed over long spans for large enterprises (LEs) and would be more likely to appear over short spans for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). We also assume that firms could improve their export performance if they carried out both product and process innovations simultaneously. Four Tobit regression models are assessed, respectively, for LEs and SMEs at different time spans. The empirical results statistically support our hypotheses.

KEY WORDS:

• export performance
• firm size
• innovation type
• process innovation
• product innovation
• time spans

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a National Research Foundation of Korea grant founded by the Korean government (NRF-2013S1A5B6043772).