Complementarities between R&D investment and exporting—Evidence from China

In view of the importance of deliberate R&D activities in achieving productivity gain via exports for firms in developing economies, this study explores a potential complementarity between firmsʹ decision to export or to invest in R&D empirically. The evidence from Chinese manufacturing firms reveals a complementarity between exporting and R&D investment in their impacts on firmʹs productivity. The complementarity test is implemented based on the supermodularity theory. After disentangling the selection bias from the decision to export and to invest R&D through mixed multinomial Logit regression, the multinomial treatment effect estimation identifies that the joint decisions improve firmsʹ labor productivity by 0.283. Moreover, the exporting status increases firms’ tendency to invest in R&D, and vice versa, thus implying the existence of complementarity from the view of firmsʹ decision.