| dc.description.abstract | This paper makes an attempt to estimate the influence of a variety of innovative activities on firm’s performance. Utilizing a rich manufacturing firm-level dataset of Taiwan electronic industry in 2011, the main objective of this paper is to investigate direct and indirect effects of in-house R&D and technology transfer on labor productivity. First of all, this paper addresses previous related literatures that are conducive to build a conceptual framework of innovations and to structure two consequential models of the study. In addition, some control variables are added into both models for mitigating potential endogenous effects that may arise from firm or industry specific characteristics. The first one is to capture the roles of relevant factors in determining R&D expenditure of a firm. Based on Tobit method, there is evidence of an inverse U-shaped relation between firm size and R&D expenditure. The optimum (satiation) point does exist, which may support Schumpeterian hypothesis. Otherwise, brand, exporting and technology transfer are positively related to R&D expenditure other than FDI. And the second model is to examine the impact of R&D, technology transfer and on-the-job training on labor productivity by classifying all observations with ownership, export activity and four-digit industry. Based on OLS method, the empirical results indicate that, except foreign technology, R&D, domestic technology and on-the-job training are found to be positively related to firm performance as measured by labor productivity, but the interactive effect of R&D and domestic technology on labor productivity is negative. For the latter, it’s interesting to ascertain if R&D really substitutes for the domestic technology. A noteworthy overcome is that R&D and technology transfer cannot facilitate labor productivity of FIEs, while on-the-job training is also unable to raise that of exporters, although FDI and export activity are generally known as important ways to acquire foreign tech-knowledge. Nevertheless, firms in various scientific sectors seem to have distinct innovative characteristics and propensity in terms of increasing labor productivity. | en_US |