Existing empirical studies have focused on investigating the impact of R&D on exports by using the data that cover mainly electronics or all manufacturing sectors. Though the studies using the data of the electronics sector find evidence of the positive relationship between R&D and exports, the other studies covering the data of the integrated macro level or the manufacturing sector find no coherent relationship between two variables. These vague results between R&D and exports are attributed to overlooking the technology gap across the industry. Therefore, we estimate the effects of R&D on exports in the high-tech and low-tech industries by using the random-effects tobit regression, and compare them to each other. This study uses samples of companies in the high-tech and low-tech industries during the period from 2008 to 2015, which are listed on the KOSPI and KOSDAQ. The regression results show that R&D has a positive effect on exports in high-tech industries while no clear evidence of the positive linkage between R&D and exports appears in low-tech industries. More importantly, we find that external marketing expenditures turn out to play a more critical role than R&D in increasing exports in low-tech industries.
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