Documents Griffith, Rachel 3 results

"This paper examines the relationship between foreign ownership and productivity, paying particular attention to two issues neglected in the existing literature—the role of multinationals in service sectors and the importance of R&D activity conducted by foreign multinationals. We review existing theoretical and empirical work, which largely focuses on manufacturing, before presenting new evidence using establishment-level data on production, service, and R&D activity for Great Britain. We find that multinationals play an important role in service sectors and that entry of foreign multinationals by takeover is more prevalent than greenfield investment. We find that British multinationals have lower levels of labour productivity than foreign multinationals, but the difference is less stark in the service sector than in the production sector, and that British multinationals have lower levels of investment and intermediate use per employee. We also find that foreign-owned multinationals conduct a substantial amount of British R&D. We discuss the implications of these and other findings for the policy debate on incentives to influence multinational firms' location choices."

"This paper compares the role innovation plays in productivity across four European countries, France, Germany, Spain, and the UK, using firm-level data from the internationally harmonized Community Innovation Surveys (CIS3). Despite a considerable number of national firm-level studies analysing this relationship, cross-country comparisons using micro data are still rare. We apply a structural model that describes the link between R&D expenditure, innovation output, and productivity (CDM model). Our econometric results suggest that overall the systems driving innovation and productivity are remarkably similar across these four countries, although we also find interesting differences, particularly in the variation in productivity that is associated with more or less innovative activities. "

"Matched employee-employer data from the UK are used to analyze the wage premium to working in an innovative firm. We find that firms that are more R&D intensive pay higher wages on average, and this is particularly true for workers in some low-skilled occupations. We propose a model in which a firm's innovativeness is reflected in the degree of complementarity between workers in low-skill and high-skilled occupations, and in which non-verifiable soft skills are an important determinant of the wages of workers in low-skilled occupations. The model yields additional predictions on training, tenure and outsourcing which we also find support for in data."