John Van Reenen

Market Share, Market Value and Innovation in a Panel of British Manufacturing Firms

This paper examines the empirical relationship between technological innovations, market share and stock market value. New developments in the estimation of dynamic count data models are used to control for unobserved firm specific heterogeneity. We find a robust and positive effect of market share on observable headcounts of innovations and patents although increased product market competition in the industry tends to stimulate innovative activity. Furthermore, the impact of innovation on market value is larger for firms with higher market shares. We argue that our results are consistent with models where high market share firms have incentives to pre-emptively innovate.

The Profitability of Innovating Firms

This article seeks to evaluate the effects on corporate profitability of producing a major innovation. We examine two types of effect: innovations can have a direct but transitory effect on profitability associated with the production of a new product or the use of a new process, and innovations can have an indirect effect on how firms generate profits because they signal the transformation of a firms internal capabilities associated with the process of innovating. Positive direct effects on the order of [[sterling]]2.1 million spread over seven years are observed for a sample of 721 large, quoted U.K. firms. More fundamentally, large indirect effects are also observed, not least because innovating firms seem to be more able to benefit from spillovers and are relatively insensitive to adverse macroeconomic shocks. These indirect effects associated with the transformation of a firms internal capabilities may be as much as three times larger than the direct effects of innovation.

Innovation and Institutional Ownership

We find that institutional ownership in publicly traded companies is associated with more innovation (measured by cite-weighted patents). To explore the mechanism through which this link arises, we build a model that nests the lazy-manager hypothesis with career-concerns, where institutional owners increase managerial incentives to innovate by reducing the career risk of risky projects. The data supports the career concerns model. First, whereas the lazy manager hypothesis predicts a substitution effect between institutional ownership and product market competition (and managerial entrenchment generally), the career-concern model allows for complementarity. Empirically, we reject substitution effects. Second, CEOs are less likely to be fired in the face of profit downturns when institutional ownership is higher. Finally, using instrumental variables, policy changes and disaggregating by type of owner we find that the effect of institutions on innovation does not appear to be due to endogenous selection.

The Returns to Education: Macroeconomics

We offer an extensive summary and a critical discussion of the empirical literature on the impact of human capital on macro-economic performance, with a particular focus on UK policy. We also highlight methodological issues and make recommendations for future research priorities. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2003.

Do R&D tax credits work? Evidence from a panel of countries 1979–1997

This paper examines the impact of fiscal incentives on the level of R&D investment. An econometric model of R&D investment is estimated using a new panel of data on tax changes and R&D spending in nine OECD countries over a 19-year period (1979–1997). We find evidence that tax incentives are effective in increasing R&D intensity. This is true even after allowing for permanent country-specific characteristics, world macro shocks and other policy influences. We estimate that a 10% fall in the cost of R&D stimulates just over a 1% rise in the level of R&D in the short-run, and just under a 10% rise in R&D in the long-run.

The Impact of Training on Productivity and Wages: Evidence from British Panel Data

It is standard in the literature on training to use wages as a sufficient statistic for productivity. But there are many reasons why wages and productivity may diverge. This paper is part of a smaller literature on the effects of work-related training on direct measures of productivity. We construct a panel of British industries between 1983 and 1996 containing training, productivity and wages. Using a variety of econometric estimation techniques (including system GMM) we find that training is associated with significantly higher productivity. Raising the proportion of workers trained in an industry by one percentage point (say from the average of 10% to 11%) is associated with an increase in value added per worker of about 0.6% and an increase in wages of about 0.3%. Furthermore, we find that the magnitude of the impact of training on wages is only half as large as the impact of training on productivity, implying that the existing literature has underestimated the importance of training. We also show evidence using complementary datasets (e.g. from individuals) that is suggestive of externalities of training and imperfect competition.

Patents, Real Options and Firm Performance

Analysing the new IFS-Leverhulme database on over 200 major British firms since 1968 we show that patents have an economically and statistically significant impact on firm-level productivity and market value. While patenting feeds into market values immediately it appears to have a slower effect on productivity. This generates valuable real options because patents provide exclusive rights to develop new innovations, enabling firms to delay investments. Higher market uncertainty, which increases the value of real options, reduces the impact of new patents on productivity. If the governments policy to reduce uncertainty is successful then this should increase the productivity of Britains knowledge capital.

Technology, Information, and the Decentralization of the Firm

This paper develops a framework to analyze the relationship between the diffusion of new technologies and the decentralization decisions of firms. Centralized control relies on the information of the principal, which we equate with publicly available information. Decentralized control, on the other hand, delegates authority to a manager with superior information. However, the manager can use her informational advantage to make choices that are not in the best interest of the principal. As the available public information about the specific technology increases, the trade-off shifts in favour of centralization. We show that firms closer to the technological frontier, firms in more heterogeneous environments and younger firms are more likely to choose decentralization. Using three datasets of French and British firms in the 1990s, we report robust correlations consistent with these predictions.

How persistently do firms innovate

This paper examines the innovative history of a number of UK firms using two large databases, looking for evidence consistent with the view that firms who innovate typically do so persistently. The first sample contains 3,304 firms who registered at least one patent in the United States during the period 1969–88, while the second consists of 1,624 firms who produced at least one major innovation at any time in the United Kingdom from 1945–82. Both datasets yield the same conclusion, namely that very few innovative firms are persistently innovative.

Employment and Technological Innovation: Evidence from U.K. Manufacturing Firms

This article uses British firm-level panel data on actual innovative activity drawn from different statistical sources to identify the effect of technical change on jobs. Previous work tends to find positive associations of proxies for technical change and employment but such studies suffer from various statistical drawbacks. In this study, even when one controls for fixed effects, dynamics, and endogeneity, innovations have a positive and significant effect on employment, which persists over several years. There seems to be little direct role for spillover effects from industry innovations or any role for industry wages or union power. Copyright 1997 by University of Chicago Press.This article uses British firm-level panel data on actual innovative activity drawn from different statistical sources to identify the effect of technical change on jobs. Previous work tends to find positive associations of proxies for technical change and employment, but such studies suffer from various statistical drawbacks. In this study, even when one controls for fixed effects, dynamics, and endogeneity, innovations have a positive and significant effect on employment, which persists over several years. There seems to be little direct role for spillover effects from industry innovations, or any role for industry wages or union power.