Ballot, Gérard [Université Panthéon-Assas (Paris II) and ERMES-CNRS, France], Fathi Fakhfakh [Université Panthéon-Assas (Paris II) and ERMES-CNRS, France], Erol Taymaz [Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey]
Revised version of this paper was published in British Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 44, Issue 3, pp. 473-495, September 2006.
The present paper offers a novel study of the effects of intangible assets on wages and productivity. Training, R&D and physical capital are all taken into account, and their joint effects are examined. We use panels of firms in order to control for unobserved fixed effects and the potential endogeneity of training and R&D, using data for France and Sweden. The estimation of productivity and wage equations allows us to show how the benefits of investment in physical capital, training, and R&D are shared between the firm and the workers. We found that firms indeed obtain the largest part of the returns to their investments, but their share is relatively lower for intangible assets (R&D and training) than for physical capital....