Arbeitspapier

Business Visits, Knowledge Diffusion and Productivity

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 visits sourced from the U.S. National Business Travel Association with OECD data on R&D and capital formation. The resulting unbalanced panel covers on average 16 sectors per year in 10 countries during the period 1998-2011 (2,262 observations). Our results suggest that mobility through business visits is an effective mechanism to improve productivity. The estimated effect is about half as large as investing in R&D, supporting viewing business visits as a form of long-term investment rather than pure consumption expenditure. In a nutshell, our outcomes support the need to recognize the private and social value of business mobility.

Language
Englisch

Bibliographic citation
Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 10421

Classification
Wirtschaft
Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes
Subject
business visits
labour mobility
knowledge
R&D
productivity

Event
Geistige Schöpfung
(who)
Piva, Mariacristina
Tani, Massimiliano
Vivarelli, Marco
Event
Veröffentlichung
(who)
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
(where)
Bonn
(when)
2016

Handle
Last update
10.03.2025, 11:41 AM CET

Data provider

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Object type

  • Arbeitspapier

Associated

  • Piva, Mariacristina
  • Tani, Massimiliano
  • Vivarelli, Marco
  • Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Time of origin

  • 2016

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