Allocation of human capital and innovation at the frontier: firm-level evidence on Germany and the Netherlands
利用德国和荷兰的企业面板数据，发现人力资本和创新的生产率效应在不同生产率分布点上存在非线性差异，前沿企业从产品创新中获益最大，而人力资本回报在低技术密集型行业中随接近技术前沿而增加。
This article examines how productivity effects of human capital and innovation vary at different points of the conditional productivity distribution. Our analysis draws upon two large unbalanced panels of 6634 enterprises in Germany and 14,841 enterprises in the Netherlands over the period 2000-2008, considering five manufacturing and services industries that differ in the level of technological intensity. Industries in the Netherlands are characterized by a larger average proportion of high-skilled employees and industries in Germany by a more unequal distribution of human capital intensity. In Germany, average innovation performance is higher in all industries, except for low-technology manufacturing, and in the Netherlands the innovation performance distributions are more dispersed. In both countries, we observe nonlinearities in the productivity effects of investing in product innovation in the majority of industries. Frontier firms enjoy the highest returns to product innovation whereas for process innovation the most negative returns are observed in the best-performing enterprises of most industries. We find that in both countries the returns to human capital increase with proximity to the technological frontier in industries with a low level of technological intensity.