The impacts of academic and industry research on high-tech manufacturing: Evidence from supercomputer usage

Abstract

It is widely accepted that research in the high-tech sector is considered a key to maintain advanced economies’ competitiveness at the face of their emerging counterparts’ rising technological sophistication. Yet, the impact of research on high-tech output has never been quantified. In this paper, we empirically examine the impact of frontier research on high-tech manufacturing production. Standard R&D expenditure measure is found to be too general to capture the input in frontier research. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel proxy for frontier research investment – the supercomputing capacity. Empirical evidence strongly supports this choice of variable. We also find that academic research exerts a larger growth effect on high-tech manufacturing output than its industrial counterpart.