Testing the effect of investments in IT and R&D on labour productivity: New method and evidence for Indian firms

Utilizing a micro-level dataset of 900 firms for the period 2000-2016 from Indian manufacturing, this paper explores the effects of technological investments on labour productivity performance of firms by looking at investments in Information Technology (IT) and Research & Development (R&D). The present study is the first to assess the role of IT and R&D jointly for Indian manufacturing. To control for transmission bias in production function estimation, a GMM-based one step control function estimator is applied. We find large effects of both IT and R&D across various sub-samples. Further, our results imply that there is a complementarity between IT and R&D in generating labour productivity growth.