The literature has pointed to different causes to explain the productivity gap between Europe and United States in the … last decades. This paper tests the hypothesis that the lower European productivity performance in comparison with the US …&D investment into productivity gains. The proposed microeconometric estimates are based on a unique longitudinal database covering …

investment in knowledge, and its productivity, looking at sectoral peculiarities which may emerge; to this end, we use a large … positive impact on a firm's productivity, with an overall elasticity of about 0.10; this general result is largely consistent … ahead in terms of the impact on productivity of their R&D investments; moreover, a shift in favour of the service sectors …

Visits as a productivity enhancing channel of technology transfer. Our analysis is based on a unique database on business … evidence that BVs contribute to fostering labour productivity in a significant way. While this is consistent with what found by … returns, being more crucial in those sectors characterized by less mobility and by lower productivity performances …

The aim of this paper is to investigate the productivity impact of business visits, relative to traditional drivers of … productivity enhancement, namely capital formation and R&D. To carry out the analysis, we combine unique and novel data on business … results suggest that mobility through business visits is an effective mechanism to improve productivity. The estimated effect …

/EU productivity gap. We find robust evidence that US firms have a higher capacity to translate R&D into productivity gains (especially … in the high-tech industries), and this contributes to explaining the higher productivity of US firms. Conversely, EU … firms are more likely to achieve productivity gains through capital-embodied technological change at least in medium and low …