university ofgroningen

groningen growth anddevelopment centre

GGDC RESEARCH MEMORANDUM 146

Productivity spillovers of organization capital

Wen Chen and Robert Inklaar

February 2014

Productivity spillovers of organization capital

Wen Chen and Robert Inklaar*

Groningen Growth and Development Centre University of Groningen, the Netherlands

February 2014

Abstract

Investments in organization capital may impact productivity of not just the

investing firm but could also spillover to other firms – like investments in

research and development. In this paper, we test whether there are (positive)

know-how spillovers and (negative) business-stealing productivity spillovers

for a panel of 1266 U.S. manufacturing firms over the period 1982–2011. We

only find evidence of negative spillovers on product-market rivals. This implies

that firms invest more in organization capital than would be socially optimal

and that existing estimates of the importance of organization capital for

productivity growth are overstated.

Keywords: Organizational capital; Intangible assets; Spillovers.

JEL Classification Numbers: D24, L22, O33.

* Corresponding author: Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, PO Box 800, 9700 AV Groningen, the Netherlands; +31 50 363 4838; r.c.inklaar@rug.nl.

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1. Introduction

The role of knowledge-based assets for growth in advanced economies has drawn much

recent interest from researchers and policy makers alike.1 But while researchers are

rapidly incorporating such assets into a standard ‘sources-of-growth’ framework,2 much

is yet unknown about the productive impact of such assets. Since knowledge-based

assets are typically intangible, they tend to be non-rival and non-excludable. This makes

determining their (economy-wide) productive impact more difficult as there may be

spillovers.3 In the case of research and development (R&D) spending, this has long been

known (e.g. Griliches, 1979, 1992) and the evidence for both positive knowledge and

negative ‘market-stealing’ spillovers is strong, see Bloom, Schankerman and van Reenen

(2013, BSV henceforth).

But R&D investment may not be the only type of knowledge-based investment to ‘spill

over’. In this paper we analyze the possible spillovers from organization capital.

Organization capital can be thought of as the information a firm has about its assets and

how these can be used in production (Prescott and Visscher, 1980) or more specifically

as the value of brand names and other knowledge embedded in firm-specific resources

(Corrado et al., 2005).4 There is a growing number of studies that show how

organization capital is important for a firm’s own productivity and overall

performance,5 and its intangibility makes it a potential source of spillovers.

The contribution of this paper is that we are the first to look for spillovers from firm

investment in organization capital. The literature on productivity spillovers from

foreign direct investment (FDI)6 is partly related since domestic firms could learn from

the foreign multinational’s superior organization. However, any learning taking place

could also be on aspects of the multinational’s productivity that are unrelated to

organization capital. Goodridge, Haskel and Wallis (2012b) do specifically analyze the

1 See e.g. Corrado and Hulten (2010) and OECD (2013). 2 See e.g. Corrado, Hulten and Sichel (2009) and Corrado, Haskel, Jona-Lasinio and Massimiliano (2012). 3 See Nakamura (2010) for a general discussion on the difficulty of accounting for the productive impact of intangible assets. 4 See also Atkeson and Kehoe (2005). Conceptualizing organization capital as embedded in the organization distinguishes it from measures of human capital, see e.g. Jovanovic (1979) and Becker (1993). 5 See e.g. Eisfeldt and Papanikolaou (2013), Hulten and Hao (2008) and Lev and Radhakrishnan (2005). 6 See e.g. Liu (2008) and Keller and Yeaple (2009).

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productivity spillovers from organization capital, yet their use of industry-level data

leads to a limited sample size and a less clear identification of the ‘pool’ of organization

capital that firms could learn from or be otherwise affected by.

Following the approach of BSV, we test for know-how spillovers that would enhance

productivity in related firms, and market-stealing spillovers that would hurt

productivity in related firms, defining ‘related’ firms in the same way as BSV. Since

organization capital aims to capture the way in which production in a firm is organized,

we expect that firms are more likely to learn and benefit from the investments of firms

that are close in technology space. Firms are likely to suffer, though, from investments

in organization capital made by close competitors, i.e. firms that are close in product

market space. By locating firms in these two spaces, we can distinguish between the two

types of spillovers.

We test these hypotheses using financial data for a sample of 1266 US manufacturing

firms over the period 1982–2011 and measures of proximity in technology space and in

product market space. We measure investment in organization capital as selling,

general and administrative (SGA) expenses, an approach followed by many in the firm-

level analysis of organization capital.7 Past investments are cumulated into a stock of

organization capital and added to a production function with (tangible) capital and

labor.

The proximity in technology space is determined using patent data – an approach

pioneered by Jaffe (1986) in the context of R&D spillovers. We assume that firms with

more patents in similar technology fields have greater potential to learn from each

other’s organization capital. One example of such a spillover is Toyota’s just-in-time

system that quickly spread to other car manufacturers.8 An example of cross-industry

diffusion is the build-to-order (BTO) distribution system that originated with Dell

Computers, but that has since been copied by firms in other industries, such as BMW.9

Though patents may not perfectly reflect the scope for such copying, they may be useful

7 E.g. Eisfeldt and Papanikolaou (2013), Hulten and Hao (2008) and Lev and Radhakrishnan (2005). 8 See Liker and Morgan (2006). 9 See Gunasekaran and Ngai (2005).

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in identifying the technological position of the firm in a broad sense.10

We measure proximity in the product market space using information on the industries

that each firm operates in and assume that greater overlap between firms makes them

fiercer competitors. Increased investment in organization capital by competitors is

likely to hurt firm performance: competitors may have to devote resources to copying

successful business models such as the BTO system. Investment in organization capital

also includes spending on marketing and sales, and while some of this spending may

expand the market, another part is aimed at capturing market share from competitors.11

Market share gains by competitors could leave firm productivity unaffected, but with

factor adjustment costs or increasing returns to scale, market stealing may leave firms

with underutilized inputs or operating at an inefficiently small scale. The market-

stealing effect could also capture heterogeneity in the productive returns to

organization capital across firms, as investments by competitors reduce the productive

impact from the firm’s own organization capital. Whatever the precise underlying

reason, a significant negative market-stealing effect would mean that in a standard

‘sources-of-growth’ analysis – with assumed productive returns based on the user cost

of capital – the contribution from organization capital to productivity would be

overstated.

Our findings are, first, that organization capital contributes substantially to the firm’s

own productivity; second, that investment in organization capital by firms that are close

in technology space has no effect on firm productivity; and third, that investment by

firms that are close in product market space has a significant negative effect on firm

productivity. These results are robust across industries and to alternative distance

measures and assumptions regarding the capitalization of organization capital.

Following the approach of BSV, we show that the private return to organization capital

of 34 percent is much higher than the social return of 21 percent. The remainder of this

paper will outline the data and methods (Section 2), present the results (Section 3) and

conclude (Section 4).

10 In addition, some business methods can be and have been patented since the 1990s, see Hall (2009). 11 See Landes and Rosenfield (1994) on the long-lived nature of (some) advertising spending and, more broadly, Bagwell (2007) on the economics of advertising.

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2. Data and methodology

In this section we discuss the econometric approach in analyzing organization capital

spillovers, followed by a detailed description of the data and the methods used to

construct the measures of organization capital and the spillover pools.

2.1 Econometric specification

Akin to BSV, the main model starts from a Cobb-Douglas production function for firm i

at time t, extended to include organization capital:

(1) 𝑌𝑖𝑡 = 𝐴𝑖𝑡 ∙ 𝐿𝑖𝑡𝛼 𝐾𝑖𝑡

𝛽 𝐺𝑖𝑡

𝛾

where Y is a measure of output (i.e. real sales), A is Hicks-neutral technology, K is the

physical capital as measured by the net stock of property, plant, and equipment, L

denotes labor input measured by the number of employees and G is the stock of

organization capital. To determine the importance of spillovers, equation (1) is further

augmented to include the dual spillover pools of organization capital:

(2) 𝑌𝑖𝑡 = 𝐴𝑖𝑡 ∙ 𝐿𝑖𝑡𝛼 𝐾𝑖𝑡

𝛽 𝐺𝑖𝑡

𝛾 𝐾𝐻𝑖𝑡

𝜑1𝑀𝐾𝑇𝑖𝑡𝜑2

where KHit captures the spillovers of management know-how in technology space and

MKTit denotes the market-stealing effect of organization capital. After log-

differentiation, equation (2) is transformed into the following estimating equation:

(3) ln𝑌𝑖𝑡 = 𝛾ln𝐺𝑖𝑡−1 + 𝜑1ln𝐾𝐻𝑖𝑡−1 + 𝜑2ln𝑀𝐾𝑇𝑖𝑡−1 + 𝜔𝐗𝑖𝑡′ + 𝜂𝑖 + 𝜏𝑡 + 𝜖𝑖𝑡

where physical capital K and labor input L are combined into 𝐗′. The technology term A

is modeled as the residual, which is decomposed into a correlated firm fixed effect (𝜂𝑖),

a full set of time dummies (𝜏𝑡), and an idiosyncratic component (𝜖𝑖𝑡) that is allowed to

be heteroskedastic and serially correlated. The main coefficients of interests are 𝜑1 and

𝜑2. Coefficient 𝜑1 tests for the presence of a spillover of management know-how and

the latter examines whether there is a market-stealing effect of organization capital.

Given our earlier discussion, we would expect to find 𝜑1 > 0 and 𝜑2 < 0.

The estimation of equation (3) can be affected by structural identification problems

related to measurement error and simultaneity bias. Measurement error arises because

firm sales are deflated by an industry price index obtained from the Bureau of Economic

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Analysis (BEA). When prices vary across firms within industries, part of the variation in

sales is due variation in prices rather than quantities (Foster, Haltiwanger and

Syverson, 2008). Simultaneity bias causes concern because there might be unobserved

productivity shocks that are known to the firms when they choose their input levels

(Griliches and Mairesse, 1998). To deal with the measurement error problem, we

include the industry output index and price index as part of the control variables 𝐗′

following BSV.12 The error term is assumed to include a firm fixed effect (𝜂𝑖) because if

the deviation between firm and industry prices is largely time-invariant, this should go

a long way towards dealing with the problem of firm-specific prices (see BSV).

Moreover, to the extent that unobserved, firm-specific productivity is also time-

invariant, the simultaneity problem should also be controlled for. Since spillovers might

take time, the organization capital and spillover terms in equation (3) are included with

a one-period lag, again following BSV.

2.2 Data sources

For this paper, firm-level data is obtained by matching two major sources: patents data

from Bureau van Dijk’s Orbis database and company accounts data from Datastream.

This paper focuses on manufacturing firms as these are the most intensive investors in

intangible assets (Goodridge, Haskel and Wallis, 2012a). Manufacturing firms are also

the most active in taking out patents, which is important for locating firms in technology

space and thus for identifying spillovers of management know-how.

For this reason, we also restrict our sample to manufacturing firms with at least one

patent. This leads to data on the patenting activity of 1722 U.S. manufacturing firms,

obtained from Orbis. These patent data are matched to company account data from

Datastream using firm international securities identification number (ISIN) codes as the

unique firm identifier. From Datastream we collect information on the number of

employees (WC07011), total sales (WC01001), the stock of physical capital (net

property, plant, and equipment, WC02501), and investment in organization capital

(selling, general and administrative expenses, WC01101), all for the period 1982–2011.

Of the 1722 firms from Orbis, 212 were not covered in Datastream and a further 244

12 See also Klette and Griliches (1996) and De Loecker (2011).

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firms had missing values for one or more of the company account data items. Dropping

these firms results in an unbalanced panel of 1266 U.S. manufacturing firms with over

18,000 usable observations. Table 1 provides some basic descriptive statistics on the

key variables.

Table 1, Descriptive statistics

Median Mean SD Observations

Sales 136.4 2636.2 14086 22587

SGA expenses 32.4 403.7 1431 18695

Physical capital 27.4 711.7 4501 22227

Employment 885.0 9095.7 26406 21544

External OC stock (tech. space) 28605.0 32710.0 21669 37980

External OC stock (market space) 1852.0 3156.0 3762 37980

Technology fields 29 62.75 88.85 1266

Product markets 3 3.01 1.86 1266 Notes: SGA: selling, general and administrative; OC: organization capital SD: standard deviation. Sales are deflated by

the industry price index and SGA expenses are deflated by the implicit GDP price deflator; all price indices are from

the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Sales, SGA expenses, physical capital and the external OC stock are all in millions of

dollars; employees, technology fields and product markets are in numbers. Computation of the external OC stocks,

technological fields and number of markets is explained in Sections 2.3-2.5.

Figure 1, Distribution of firms across industries

Figure 1 shows the distribution of firms across 19 broader (2-digit) manufacturing

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industries. The sample of firms is fairly concentrated in the more high-tech sectors of

the economy, such as computers & electronics and chemicals & pharmaceuticals, with

the top-five industries accounting for around 80 percent of the firms. However, as

shown in the sensitivity analysis below, this concentration does not bias the results.

2.3 Measuring organization capital

Investment in organization capital has been measured in a number of ways in the

literature. These include using business surveys (Black and Lynch, 2005), part of the

wage bill of managers (Squicciarini and Mouel, 2012), as the residual from a production

function (Lev and Radhakrishnan, 2005) and using sales, general and administrative

expenses (Tronconi and Marzetti, 2011; Eisfeldt and Papanikolaou, 2013). Given the

availability of the required data, we opt to use SGA expenses for measuring investment

in organization capital.

Lev and Radhakrishnan (2005) present detailed arguments and examples of how

resources allocated to this expense item can yield improvements in employee

incentives, distribution systems, marketing technologies, and a wide range of other

organizational structures. Further evidence is from Eisfeldt and Papanikolaou (2013)

who find that their measure of organization capital based on SGA expenses correlates

highly with the managerial quality scores constructed by Bloom and Van Reenen

(2007). This evidence suggests that using SGA expenses to measure organization capital

is informative about the quality of management practices across firms.

SGA expenses includes R&D expenditure, so to focus specifically on organization capital

we subtract of R&D expenditure to get our measure of investment in organization

capital.13 To convert this flow measure into organization capital stock, we apply the

perpetual inventory method:

(4) 𝐺𝑖,𝑡 = (1 − 𝛿)𝐺𝑖,𝑡−1 +𝑆𝐺𝐴𝑖,𝑡

𝑝𝑡

where 𝑝𝑡 is the implicit GDP price deflator retrieved from the Bureau of Economic

Analysis. To implement the law of motion in equation (4), an initial stock and a rate of

13 Tronconi and Marzetti (2011) measure investment as 20 percent of this amount to reflect that not all SGA expenses add to organization capital. This is irrelevant from an econometric point of view.

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depreciation must be chosen. Assuming a steady-state relationship from the Solow

growth model, the initial stock can be calculated according to:

(5) 𝐺0 =𝑆𝐺𝐴1

𝑔+𝛿

where g denotes the steady-state growth rate of organization capital and δ is the rate at

which organization capital become obsolete. According to the aggregate estimates of the

INTAN-Invest database compiled by Corrado et al. (2012), organization capital grows at

an average rate of 6 percent per year, so we use this value for g in equation (5).

Organization capital can depreciate over time for a variety of reasons. The existing

management practices become obsolete if improvements come along. Moreover,

organization capital can also erode through work attrition and the adoption of new

products and/or production processes (Hulten and Hao, 2008). In the existing empirical

works, the rate of depreciation various from a slow rate at 10 percent (Tronconi and

Marzetti, 2011) to a much larger rate at 40 percent (Corrado, Hulten and Sichel, 2009).

Given the fact that organization capital has two contrasting components: a long-lasting

learning-by-doing element which depreciates like R&D; and a short-lived organizational

‘forgetting’ dynamic which depreciates like advertising, a rate that lies in the mid-range

is chosen as the benchmark rate; that is, δ = 0.25. The alternative rates of 10 and 40

percent will be considered in the robustness analysis.

2.4 Technological proximity

We assume that firms are more likely to learn about from firms’ organization capital if

those firms are closer in technology space and the technology space is defined using

patent data. This assumes that firms developing similar technologies, have organized

their organizations similarly. As discussed earlier, the diffusion of just-in-time

production system and build-to-order supply chain management are two good cases in

point.

We use the patents data provided in Orbis, which originates from the European Patent

Office’s PATSTAT database. This database covers over 80 percent of the world’s patents

to date and these patents are classified by four-digit international patent classification

(IPC) code. This means that even if the firm had been awarded patents from patenting

offices in different countries, their patents can be compared. Our sample of 1266

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manufacturing firms obtained around half a million patents spanning 612 technology

fields, as defined by the first three digits of the IPC code.9 All patents of a firm are

included, partly for the practical reason that it is not possible to select patents for a

specific time frame, but also because it is helpful to define the ‘average’ technological

position of each firm over time, rather than focusing only on activity for a specific

period.

Define the vector 𝑇𝑖= (𝑇𝑖1, 𝑇𝑖2, 𝑇𝑖3…𝑇𝑖612) where 𝑇𝑖𝜏 indicates the number of patents of

firm i in technology class τ. Firm’s knowledge diffusion distance is then calculated as the

uncentered correlation between all firm i, j paring as in Jaffe (1986):

(6) 𝑃𝑟𝑜𝑥𝑖𝑚𝑖𝑡𝑦𝑖,𝑗𝐾𝐻 = 𝑇𝑖𝑇𝑗

′ (𝑇𝑖𝑇𝑖′)

1

2(𝑇𝑗𝑇𝑗′)

1

2⁄

The larger the number the more effective the knowledge of (management) know-how

can be diffused between firms i and j (or vice versa). As indicated in Table 1, the media

firm is active in 29 technological fields, providing ample opportunity for learning from

other firms in any of these fields. Analogous to BSV, the spillover pool of management

know-how available to firm i at time t is calculated as:

(7) 𝐾𝐻𝑖,𝑡 = ∑ 𝑃𝑟𝑜𝑥𝑖𝑚𝑖𝑡𝑦𝑖,𝑗𝐾𝐻 × 𝐺𝑗,𝑡𝑗,𝑗≠𝑖

2.5 Product market proximity

We also locate firms in product market space, using information on the industries in

which firms are active. Datastream provides up to eight industry codes for each firm at

the four-digit standard industrial classification (SIC) level, which means that a firm can

be active in up to eight different markets. As shown in Table 1, firms on average report

sales activities in 3 different markets out of a total of 569 different four-digit SIC

industries.11 Define the vector 𝑆𝑖= (𝑆𝑖1, 𝑆𝑖2, 𝑆𝑖3…𝑆𝑖569) where 𝑆𝑖𝑘 indicates whether or

not firm i sells goods in market k. In contrast to BSV, we have no information on the

9 The level of disaggregation of a 3-digit IPC code generates a workable and comparable amount of technology classes to that of BSV. A further breakdown of the classification codes to the fourth digit is not pursued Henderson, Jaffe and Trajtenberg (2005) argue that a finer disaggregation of patent classes is not necessarily superior because the classification is subject to a greater degree of measurement error. 11 Only 61 firms (5 percent) are active in eight different markets, while more firms (29 percent) are active in just two markets.

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share of sales in each market, but that information was not crucial to their results. 13

Despite of this deficiency, firms could still be positioned in the market space (with

somewhat less variation admittedly). Analogous to the know-how proximity measure,

the market proximity measure for any two firms i and j is calculated as:

(8) 𝑃𝑟𝑜𝑥𝑖𝑚𝑖𝑡𝑦𝑖,𝑗𝑀𝐾𝑇 = 𝑆𝑖𝑆𝑗

′ (𝑆𝑖𝑆𝑖′)

1

2(𝑆𝑗𝑆𝑗′)

1

2⁄

The spillover pool of product market for firm i in year t is then constructed as:

(9) 𝑀𝐾𝑇𝑖,𝑡 = ∑ 𝑃𝑟𝑜𝑥𝑖𝑚𝑖𝑡𝑦𝑖,𝑗𝑀𝐾𝑇 × 𝐺𝑗,𝑡𝑗,𝑗≠𝑖

For the separate identification of know-how and product-market spillovers we rely on

differences in the two proximity measures. The correlation between the proximity

metrics in technology and product-market space is 0.196, indicating substantial

variation between the two proximity measures.

3. Results

In this section, we discuss the main empirical findings, with first results of production

function estimates without spillovers, followed by the evidence on the presence of

spillovers, including the robustness of that evidence. Finally, we discuss what the

spillover results imply in terms of the private and social return to investment in

organization capital.

3.1 Production function estimates without spillovers

Table 2 shows production function estimates, where we consider estimation with firm

and year fixed effects (FE) and instrumental variables (IV). In the IV estimates, we

follow Tronconi and Marzetti (2011) and use two lagged values of the inputs as

instruments. The first two columns of Table 2 show production function results with

only capital and labor as inputs. Both are highly significant and the sum of their

coefficients is very close to unity. This implies that when taking only ‘traditional’ factor

inputs into account, returns to scale appear approximately constant. In the next two

13 For a further comparison, we constructed a market spillover variable for R&D stock like the one used by BSV but based on our information on the number of active markets. For 237 firms, this market spillover variable can be compared to the corresponding BSV variable. The correlation coefficient is high at 0.68, giving confidence that our market spillover measure is comparable to theirs.

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columns, the stock of organization capital is added to the production function and it

enters with a highly significant coefficient. This finding is in line with the earlier firm-

level analyses of organization capital and provides further support for considering

intangible assets as factors in production alongside tangible capital (Corrado, Hulten

and Sichel, 2005, 2009; Van Ark et al., 2009).

Table 2, Firm production function estimates, without and with organization capital Physical capital and labor Augmented by organization capital

FE IV FE IV

Physical capital (K) 0.160*** 0.134***

0.102*** 0.087***

(0.023) (0.031) (0.024) (0.032)

Labor (L) 0.782*** 0.835***

0.528*** 0.635***

(0.034) (0.036) (0.041) (0.048)

Organization capital (G)

0.561*** 0.380***

(0.044) (0.033)

Sum of coefficients 0.942 0.969

1.191 1.102

Observations 20722 15683

17263 13593

Adjusted R2 0.613 0.574 0.668 0.639

Note: FE: fixed effects; IV: instrumental variables. Dependent variable in all estimations is real sales and all

specifications include firm and year fixed effects and the industry output index. Robust standard errors,

clustered by firm, are shown in parentheses. In the IV columns, lagged values of the explanatory variables

are used as instruments. *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1.

The output elasticity of organization capital is substantial in size and the sum of

coefficients now point to increasing returns to scale. The IV coefficient of 0.38 is also

very comparable to the coefficients found by Tronconi and Marzetti (2011): the average

of their coefficients for R&D and for non-R&D firms is 0.385.14 With these results, a

necessary condition for there to be any scope for spillovers has been satisfied:

organization capital contributes systematically to firm productivity.

3.2 Production function estimates with spillovers

Table 3 presents the main spillover results. The FE and IV estimates are highly

comparable with no significant effect on productivity from the diffusion of

14 In some of their specifications, namely when estimating a translog rather than a Cobb-Douglas function and when estimating in first differences rather than levels, they find somewhat higher coefficients.

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organizational know-how from firms that are close in technology space but negative

and significant effects of organizational capital of close competitors in the product

market.15 Taken at face value, this implies that investment in organization capital is too

high, since there are no positive know-how spillovers to offset the negative market-

stealing effects. Note that this is under the assumption that the technology space is the

relevant space for diffusion of organizational capital know-how; we discuss this issue

further in the conclusions. We first proceed by discussing the robustness of the results

in Table 3 and the implications of these findings for social and private returns to

organization capital.

Table 3, Organization capital spillover estimates

FE IV

Physical capital (K) 0.114*** 0.101***

(0.023) (0.031)

Labor (L) 0.595*** 0.616***

(0.039) (0.052)

Organization capital (G) 0.210*** 0.153***

(0.037) (0.044)

Know-how diffusion (KH) 0.199 0.291

(0.258) (0.294)

Marketing-stealing (MKT) -0.130*** -0.163***

(0.050) (0.063)

Observations 16314 14840

Adjusted R2 0.702 0.694 Note: FE: fixed effects; IV: instrumental variables. Dependent variable in all estimations is real sales and all

specifications include firm and year fixed effects, the current and lagged value of industry sales and the

industry price index. Robust standard errors, clustered by firm, are shown in parentheses. In the IV

columns, two lagged values of the explanatory variables are used as instruments. *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, *

p<0.1.

3.3 Sensitivity analysis

We first consider the sensitivity of the results to the exclusion of individual industries.

Figure 1 showed that the firms in our sample are strongly concentrated in a few, mostly

high-tech, industries. In Table 4, we therefore consider the sensitivity of the results in

Table 3 when excluding – one at a time – the five most heavily-represented industries,

15 Regressions using Newey-West standard errors as in BSV show very similar results.

13

who together account for 80 percent of the sample.16 The table shows that the main

findings are unchanged: there is no positive know-how spillover and significantly

negative spillovers from product-market rivals. We also get very similar results for the

IV specification.

Table 4, Organization capital spillovers – sensitivity to exclusion of individual industries

Excluding industry: Chemicals Computers Electrical Machinery Miscellaneous

Physical capital (K) 0.123*** 0.132*** 0.109*** 0.115*** 0.113***

(0.024) (0.033) (0.024) (0.025) (0.024)

Labor (L) 0.561*** 0.559*** 0.592*** 0.594*** 0.623***

(0.040) (0.056) (0.041) (0.041) (0.039)

Organization capital (G) 0.201*** 0.234*** 0.218*** 0.216*** 0.180***

(0.034) (0.057) (0.037) (0.039) (0.038)

Know-how diffusion (KH) 0.159 0.43 0.195 0.254 0.139

(0.273) (0.300) (0.271) (0.320) (0.247)

Marketing-stealing (MKT) -0.096** -0.141*** -0.118*** -0.141*** -0.130***

(0.041) (0.051) (0.045) (0.048) (0.046)

Observations 13502 9487 15703 14636 15041

Adjusted R2 0.772 0.511 0.710 0.702 0.709 Note: Each column runs the FE regression from Table 3, excluding the industry named in the column title; see

notes to Table 3 for details on the estimation. *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1.

To rule out the possibility that the results are specific to the definition of ‘proximity’ in

the technology and product market space, we consider two alternatives: (1) IPC code at

2-digit with SIC code at 3-digit (denoted ‘Proximity (2-3)’) and (2) IPC code at 1-digit

with SIC code at 2-digit (denoted ‘Proximity (1-2)’). As can be in Table 5, the negative

effect of product-market spillovers remains strongly significant. Defining product-

market proximity at the 2-digit level even leads to much larger negative effects. This

large difference in magnitude is mainly due to a much smaller variance of the market

spillover pool variable 𝑀𝐾𝑇𝑖,𝑡, since firms are – by definition – much closer competitors.

Since the rate at which organization capital becomes obsolete is far from settled, we

repeat the analysis using two other depreciation rates proposed in the literature: a

slower rate at 10 percent and a faster one at 40 percent. As shown in the third and

fourth column of Table 5, the market stealing effect is robust to these alternative rates

of depreciation. The final column shows results are also unchanged when imposing

16 Results for the other 14 industries are very similar.

14

constant returns to scale on the production function by normalizing all variables by

employment. In contrast to the robust evidence on the presence of a negative market-

stealing effect of organization capital, no evidence is found in support of a positive

spillover of organizational know-how across technology space. We obtain very similar

results for the IV specification.

Table 5, Organization capital spillovers – sensitivity to measurement of proximity, depreciation of organization capital and returns to scale

Proximity (2-3) Proximity (1-2) =10% =40% Per worker

Physical capital (K) 0.114*** 0.113*** 0.128*** 0.102*** 0.073***

(0.023) (0.023) (0.023) (0.023) (0.023)

Labor (L) 0.597*** 0.599*** 0.631*** 0.566***

(0.039) (0.039) (0.039) (0.039)

Organization capital (G) 0.206*** 0.205*** 0.154*** 0.256*** 0.215***

(0.037) (0.036) (0.039) (0.036) (0.034)

Know-how diffusion (KH) 0.469 0.777 0.223 0.242 0.075

(0.328) (0.664) (0.272) (0.252) (0.049)

Marketing-stealing (MKT) -0.111** -0.404*** -0.124*** -0.137*** -0.176***

(0.055) (0.104) (0.047) (0.044) (0.049)

Observations 16314 16314 16314 16314 16230

Adjusted R2 0.702 0. 703 0.700 0.705 0.492 Note: Each column runs the FE regression from Table 3; see notes to Table 3 for details on the estimation. Proximity (2-3) defines technology proximity at the 2-digit IPC and product market proximity at the 3-digit SIC level; Proximity (1-2) is defined analogously. The subsequent two columns vary the assumption regarding the depreciation of organization capital and the final column imposes constant returns to scale by normalizing all variables by employment. *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1.

3.4 Private and social returns to organization capital

Our results imply that the private returns to investments in organization capital are

lower than the social returns. To see this, consider the output elasticity γ = ρ · (G/Y),

where ρ is the marginal productivity of organization capital G. If one assumes a constant

marginal product γ and a constant discount rate r along with an infinite planning

horizon, then ρ can be given the economic interpretation of a marginal gross internal

rate of return.15 Following BSV, the marginal social return (MSR) to organization capital

of firm i is defined as the increase in aggregate output generated by a marginal increase

in firm i’s organization capital stock:

(10) 𝑀𝑆𝑅 = (𝑌/𝐺)(𝛾 + 𝜑1)

15 For detailed derivation and discussion, see Hall, Mairesse and Mohnen (2010).

15

where γ and 𝜑1 are the coefficients from estimating equation (3) as given in Table 3.

The MSR can be interpreted as the marginal product of a firm’s organization capital

contributed: (1) directly from firm’s own organization capital stock (γ) and (2)

indirectly from the external stock of management know-how 𝜑1. The marginal private

return (MPR) is defined as the increase in firm i’s output generated by a marginal

increase in its own stock of organization capital:

(11) 𝑀𝑃𝑅 = (𝑌/𝐺)(𝛾 − 𝜑2)

Own organization capital increase a firm’s own sales, thus γ is also included in

calculating the MPR. Also included is 𝜑2 since the firm’s own organization capital also

has a business stealing effect in the product market. This effect increases the private

incentive to invest in organization capital by redistributing output between firms.

Using the FE estimates from Table 3 and using the median value of median value of Y/G

of 1.008, the MSR is 21 percent (1.008 × (0.210+0)) and the MPR is 34 percent (1.008 ×

(0.210+0.130)). The IV estimates imply an MSR of 15 percent and an MPR of 32 percent

so for this specification, the private return is double the social return. Given the strong

assumptions outlined above, though, these returns estimates should be seen as

indicative (see also BSV).

4. Conclusions

This paper is the first that attempts to link the studies finding productivity benefits of

investments in organization capital to the aggregate ‘sources-of-growth’ studies that

impute a rate of return to organization capital. In the case of traditional tangible capital,

aggregate productivity benefits are simply a summation of firm benefits, but when the

asset is intangible, such as organization capital, there may be spillovers across firms

that drive a wedge between the private and social returns of investment.

Our analysis is based on a sample of 1266 US manufacturing firms. We locate each of

these firms in technology space, to capture potential (positive) spillovers of

organizational know-how across technologically similar firms, and in product market

space to capture negative ‘market-stealing’ spillovers from competitors. We find clear

support for these negative spillovers and none for positive spillovers of know-how.

16

The absence of a significant positive ‘know-how’ effect could mean that a)

organizational know-how does not spillover between firms, perhaps because it is too

tacit or firm-specific (Lev and Radhakrishnan, 2005); b) the negative spillovers between

product-market rivals are actually a net effect of negative market-stealing and positive

know-how effects; or c) firms do learn from the organization capital of other firms, but

these other firms are neither close in technology nor in product-market space. While

our results do not shed light on which of these three alternative explanations is most

plausible, our findings do limit the scope for where positive productivity spillovers from

organization capital could be found.

The negative ‘market-stealing’ spillovers imply that firms face a higher private return to

investment in organization capital than the social return: the social return considers

only the productivity improvement for the firm itself, while the investing firm also takes

the negative effect on its competitors into account. Our estimates show that the negative

effect on its competitors can be as large as the positive effect for the firm itself. As a

result, firms can be expected to keep investing in organization capital beyond the point

where social returns equal (social) marginal cost. This implies that existing studies that

impute a productive return to organization capital considerably overestimate its

contribution to aggregate growth.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Marcel Timmer for useful comments and suggestions.

17

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