Session IIB
Jacques Mairesse (CREST and NBER)
Pierre Mohnen (Universiteit Maastricht and MERIT)
mairesse@ensae.fr
P.Mohnen@MERIT.unimaas.nl
R&D and productivity: the role of patents
Abstract
Most of the studies on the rate of return on R&D and/or the contribution of R&D to
productivity have related R&D directly to productivity through an extended production or
cost function, where R&D is treated as an additional input on the same footing as labor and
capital. Generally these studies do not incorporate any information on the R&D output, for
instance as measured by the occurrence of patents or the number of patents. Moreover, few of
these studies correct for selection bias, accounting for non-R&D performers, and for
simultaneity bias, recognizing the stochastic nature of R&D itself.
We follow the lines of the Crépon, Duguet and Mairesse (1998) model, comprising an R&D
equation, a selectivity equation accounting for non-R&D performers, a patent equation and a
productivity equation, and estimate this structural model. We reexamine the R&Dproductivity
relationship at the light of the information provided by the innovation surveys.
We use the data of the innovation surveys of France, Germany, Spain and the United
Kingdom from the second wave of CIS (Community Innovation Surveys), namely the microaggregated
data from CIS2, which pertains to the years 1994-1996. We focus our analysis on
the two types of information provided by CIS2 regarding patents: how important patent
disclosures are as sources of information for innovation, and whether innovators protect their
innovations by patenting or not.
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