ICT AND R&D AS INPUTS OR EFFICIENCY DETERMINANTS? ANALYSING ITALIAN MANUFACTURING FIRMS 2007-2009

Are Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Research & Development (R&D) productive inputs or efficiency determinants? This is the topic of this paper which analyses a sample of 2691 Italian manufacturing firms over the period 2007-2009. The empirical setting is based on a production function estimated through the Stochastic Frontier (SF) approach. ICT and R&D are used once as inputs, once as efficiency determinants (Coelli et al., 1999). The results show that the rates of return of ICT and R&D investments are quite high (0.08 for ICT and 0.04 for R&D) when they enter into the model only as inputs. We also documented that ICT and R&D contribute positively to explain the efficiency scores.