This paper examines the relationship between foreign ownership and productivity, paying particular attention to two issues neglected in the existing literature Ö the role of multinationals in service sectors and the importance of R&D activity conducted by foreign multinationals. We review...

This paper investigates the determinants of profit change over the period 1991-2008 for the Water and Sewerage Companies (WaSCs) in the English and Welsh water and sewerage industry. We firstly apply an input oriented profit decomposition approach following the approach of De Witte & Saal...

The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of regulation in the financial performance of the Water and Sewerage companies (WaSCs) in England and Wales. We apply a panel index approach across WaSCs over time to decompose unit-specific (temporal) index number based profitability growth as a...

The paper focuses on the impact of business related R&D spending on input factor productivity (IFP) using international patent applications as a technology diffusion channel. Considering the relationship between research and productivity, international patent pattern reflects the link between...

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...

The missing effect of investments of firms in information and communication technologies on productivity is studied by various recent papers (e.g. Oliner and Sichels 1994, Landauer 1995, Brynjolfsson and Hitt 1996). Several explanations are given for this missing link. Our paper deals with two...

In this paper, it is argued that ICT investment is closely linked with complementary innovations and most productive in firms with innovative experience. In an analysis based on firm?level panel data covering the period 1994?99, system GMM estimates for an extended production function framework...

In order to assess the productivity effects of information and communication technologies (ICT), regressions based on cross?sectional firm?level data may yield unreliable results for the commonly employed production function framework. In this paper, various estimation biases and econometric...

This paper examines the relationship between the use of advanced technologies such as ICT, and outcomes such as productivity, the skill mix of the workforce and wages using micro data for the U.S. and Germany. We find support to the idea that U.S. businesses engage in experimentation in a...

This paper analyses the impact of business process outsourcing (BPO) on firm productivity based on a comprehensive German firm-level panel data set covering manufacturing and service industries. The growing importance of service inputs into the production process is undisputed. Firms...