Norbert Janz

Firm Level Innovation and Productivity - Is there a Common Story Across Countries?

Recent studies have documented extensive heterogeneity in firm performance within countries, and innovation has been found as an important determinant. This paper addresses the issue of innovation firm performance across countries. A growing number of national firm level studies on the innovation-productivity link have been conducted using new internationally harmonized survey data, known in Europe as Community Innovation Survey (CIS). Mainly due to confidentiality reasons cross-country comparisons of CIS data are still rare. The contribution of this paper is its unique approach of pooling original firm observations from Germany and Sweden. Applying a knowledge production function that gives the relationship between innovation input, innovation output and productivity, we find to a very large extent a common cross-country story for knowledge intensive manufacturing firms. Some interesting country-specific effects are reported as well.

Export and Innovation Activities in the German Service Sector: Empirical Evidence at the Firm Level

In this paper we analyse the relationship between export and innovation activities of German service sector companies using data from the 1997 wave of the Mannheim Innovation Panel in the Service Sector. There is a lot of support for the Schumpeterian hypothesis of export activities being mainly driven by innovation activities. Factor endowment theories are only partially supported. While human capital significantly improves export performance, labour costs hamper it only in selected branches. Moreover, allowing for simultaneity we find that export activities do not enforce innovation activities.

Innovation Dynamics and Endogenous Market Structure Econometric Results from Aggregated Survey Data

This paper examines empirically the relationship between innovation and market structure within a simultaneous framework at the industry level of aggregation. We use a model in which R&D affects both, demand and cost conditions. An optimization process leads to optimal industry R&D expenditure and market structure in a symmetric equilibrium. The model is applied to a newly constructed panel for Germany. Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimation techniques for dynamic panel data systems are used to estimate the parameters of interest. We found a positive long?run effect of R&D on markets? sales concentration. In contrast, competition enforces innovation, i.e. sales concentration has a negative impact on R&D.