Nottingham Centre for Research on
Globalisation and Economic Policy (GEP)

GEP Research Paper 05/04

Knowledge Accumulation and Productivity: Evidence from Plant Level Data for Ireland

Mark Cassidy, Holger Görg and Eric Strobl

Abstract

This paper investigates whether knowledge accumulating activities, such as exporting, R&D, or worker training, can enhance plants' productivity. To this end we use plant level panel data for Irish manufacturing. Our results importantly indicate that productivity enhancing effects of these factors are found only for domestic firms, but not for foreign multinationals located in Ireland. We postulate a number of potential reasons inherent of multinational activity possibly driving this result.

Issued in February 2005.

This paper is available in PDF format .

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