R&D volatility and firm growth: The case of manufacturing firms in Turkey

The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of R&D volatility on firm growth in the Turkish manufacturing industry. Our empirical analysis covers the period 2006-2015 and mainly relies on "The R&D Activities Survey in Business Enterprises Sector Micro Dataset" collected from TURKSTAT. As R&D and non-R&D firms are not randomly selected in our dataset, to overcome the possible selection problem we use Heckman's two-stage procedure for sample selection. Our results show that R&D volatility which is an indicator of proactive R&D management significantly improves the performance of the firm growth with more pronounced effects at the upper end of the size distribution. Tangible and intangible asset volatility has been observed as a complementary element regarding this positive relationship between R&D volatility and growth, particularly for larger firms.