Does publicly-financed R&D spill over to private sector productivity growth? We document a robust correlation between UK public-sector financed R&D disbursed via research councils and market sector total factor productivity growth.

This paper looks at the channels through which intangible assets affect productivity. The econometric analysis exploits a new dataset on intangible investment (INTAN-Invest) in conjunction with EUKLEMS productivity estimates for 10 EU member states from 1998 to 2007. We find that (a) the...

This note responds to a critique of our recent paper, “Can Intangible Investment Explain the UK Productivity Puzzle?â€. In that critique Martin and Rowthorn (MR) present a re-working of data on labour composition which they feel refutes an element of our argument. In this response we...

This paper investigates whether intangibles might explain the UK productivity puzzle. We note that since the recession: (a) firms have upskilled faster than before; (b) intangible investment in R&D and software has risen whereas tangible investment has fallen; and (c) intangible and telecoms...

Pressure on public finances has increased scrutiny of public support for innovation. We examine two particular issues. First, there have been many recent calls for the (relatively new) UK R&D subsidy to be extended to other "research" activities, such as software. Second, argument still rages...

We (a) propose an implementable innovation index, (b) relate it to existing innovation definitions and (c) show whole-economy and industry-specific results for the UK market sector, 2000-2005. Our innovation measure starts by observing that we could get more GDP without innovation by simply...

We examine the relationships between productivity growth, IT investment and organisational change (DO) using UK firm data. Consistent with the small number of other micro studies we find (a) IT appears to have high returns in a growth accounting sense when DO is omitted; when DO is included the IT...

We attempt to replicate for the UK the Corrado, Hulten and Sichel (2005, 2006) work on spending on intangible assets in the US. Their work suggests private sector expenditure (investment) on intangibles is about 13% (11%) of US GDP 1998-2000, with intangible investment about equal to tangible...

Data are shown to generate efficiency gains but to have been unevenly shared across firms and households, and the subpar economic performance of most advanced economies (prior to the pandemic) has been attributed to increased market power originating, at least in part, from the increased use of...

A defining aspect of the digital age is data and its business use. Data have become an important input for firms (e.g., to train artificial intelligence algorithms) but data use is neither accounted for in macroeconomic statistics nor part of business contracts for goods and services provided to...