Working Paper #2017-004
Labour mobility through business visits as a way to foster 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 recognise
the private and social value of business mobility.
- Keywords
-
- Business visits
- labour mobility
- knowledge
- R&D
- productivity
- JEL codes
-
- O33
Cite this as
APA 7th ed.Piva, M., Tani, M., & Vivarelli, M. (2017). Labour mobility through business visits as a way to foster productivity (UNU-MERIT Working Paper No. 2017-004). UNU-MERIT. https://unu-merit.nl/publications/working-papers/abstract/?id=6343