Product market regulation, innovation and productivity

Several recent policy and academic contributions consider that liberalising product markets would foster innovation and growth. This paper analyses the innovation-productivity relationship at the industry-level for a sample of OECD manufacturing industries. We pay particular attention to the vertically-induced influence of product market regulation (PMR) of key input sectors of the economy on the innovative process of manufacturing and its consequences on productivity. We test for a differentiated effect of this type of PMR depending on whether countries are technological leaders or laggards in a given industry and for a given time period. Contrary to the most widespread policy claims, the …