Exporting, R&D, and absorptive capacity in UK establishments

By Richard D. F. Harris, Q. Li. 2008

251 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper models the determinants of exporting (both in terms of export propensity and export intensity), with a particular emphasis on the importance of absorptive capacity and the endogenous link between exporting and undertaking R&D. Based on a merged dataset of the 2001 Community Innovation Survey and the 2000 Annual Respondents Database for the UK, our results suggest that establishment size plays a fundamental role in explaining exporting. Meanwhile, alongside other factors, undertaking R&D activities and having greater absorptive capacity (for scientific knowledge, international co-operation, and organizational structure) significantly reduce entry barriers into export markets, having controlled for self-selectivity into exporting. Nevertheless, conditional on entry into international markets, only greater absorptive capacity (associated with scientific knowledge) seems to further boost export performance in such markets, whereas spending on R&D no longer has an impact on exporting behaviour once we have taken into account its endogenous nature.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3f4088fddbe97f500e3bb556503b69fe84ce6073

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Citations in the corpus

In Search of Environmental Spillovers (2009, background): “In addition, Harris and Li (2008) provide a clear link between a firm‟s export activities and its absorptive capacity.”
Exporting and innovation performance: Analysis of the annual Small Business Survey in the UK (2011, background): “As with many studies in this area, Harris and Li (2005a, 2006, 2009) demonstrate, both through a review of the literature and through original empirical work, that links exist between exporting behaviour and innovative behaviour.”
Experience, age and exporting performance in UK SMEs (2016, methodology): “…non-exporters, and generally find a positive link between innovation and exporting in a variety of contexts (Bleaney & Wakelin, 2002; Cassiman & Golovko, 2011; D’Angelo et al., 2013; Harris & Li, 2009; Lachenmaier & Wößmann, 2006; Lefebvre & Lefebvre, 2001; Roper & Love, 2002; Sterlacchini, 1999).”
Technology and costs in international competitiveness: From countries and sectors to firms (2014, unknown): “…to investigate the relation between innovation and firm performance, both in Italy (see among the others Vivarelli et al., 1996) and in other European countries (see Belderbos et al., 2004; Harris and Li, 2009; Van Beveren and Vandenbussche, 2010, for the Netherlands, UK, and Belgium respectively).”
Is a higher rate of R&D tax credit a panacea for low levels of R&D in disadvantaged regions? (2009, background): “…is also associated with greater exposure to internationalisation (as R&D/absorptive capacity reduce entry barriers into international markets)—see Harris and Li (2008) for a review of the literature and empirical evidence of nexus between firm's internationalisation , R&D/innovation activities,…”
SMEs' internationalisation: When does innovation matter? (2019, background): “, Esteve-Pérez & Rodríguez, 2013; García & Calantone, 2002; Higón & Driffield, 2010; Love, Roper, & Zhou, 2016). For example, Kyläheiko, Jantunen, Puumalainen, Saarenketo, and Tuppura (2011) propose that innovation and business internationalisation are strategic activities that are highly connected,”
R&D, product innovation, and exporting: evidence from UK new technology based firms (2011, methodology): “Our results show some strong similarities with, for example, Harris and Li (2009), but also some differences.”
Export propensity, export intensity and firm performance: The role of the entrepreneurial founding team (2012, background): “R&D expenditure is consistently found to be positively related both to export performance (Girma et al 2008; Harris and Li 2009) and to firm performance generally (Roper et al 2008), and so a measure”
Models of regional growth: past, present and future (2011, unknown): “The latter has recently been used to construct a measure of absorptive capacity (Harris and Li, 2008), while the use of the ARD has resulted in a number of studies already (see Harris and Trainor, 2005; Duranton and Overman, 2006).”
Global networks, local specialisation and regional patterns of innovation (2020, background): “significant, as well as trade openness and inward FDI, whose poor performance as predictors of innovation performance has already been acknowledged in the literature (Ganotakis and Love, 2011; Harris and Li, 2008; Aghion et al., 2009).”