Several studies highlight the economic benefits of standards, while the benefit of taking part in standardization remains a rather unexplored mystery to date. In theory, standard setters not only benefit from the possibility to monitor and shape the development of standards but also access a wide range of knowledge sources in the standards committee. Therefore, we investigate how the participation within formal standardization is related to the performance of 1561 German companies. A Cobb-Douglas production function is estimated in order to use the Solow-residuals as indicator for the firm performance. Participation within formal standardization is measured by the number of committee seats at the German Institute for Standardization (DIN). Our results suggest that participation within formal standardization is positively related to firm performance in the manufacturing sector. In the service sector, no clear evidence for such a relationship is found. This finding also holds true when we test if a service providers' intellectual property is well protected through patents.

We examine the impact of formal standards on trade in global value chains (GVCs) in Europe. Using a gravity model approach for panel data, we estimate the influence of national, European and international standards on trade in value-added and gross trade flows within Europe. We find that national standards on their own hamper trade in European value chains while European and international standards foster trade. European standards have greater influence on trade in inner-European value chains whereas international standards have positive effects on imports into Europe from third countries. European standards therefore reduce information asymmetries between market actors in the value chains of the European Single Market. International standards serve as a means of global communication between international trade partners. In addition, we find a positive effect of an interaction term between national and European standards in European value chains confirming the necessity of national standardization. Furthermore, we consider our findings not only within international political economy's theoretical literature regarding the governance of GVCs but also, the subsequent policy implications of our findings in terms of economic growth and development.

Formal standards codify knowledge. Next to patents representing the generation of innovative knowledge, standards can hence be used to proxy the diffusion of innovative knowledge in macroeconomic growth models. Previous work mainly investigates the positive impact of in particular patents, but also standards on economic growth in short term, single country studies. This study is the first to examine the long-term effects of formal standards and patents on economic growth in a panel of eleven EU-15 countries between 1981 and 2014 using panel cointegration techniques. From policy makers' perspective standardization has also gained recently an increasing attention, e.g. in the call for the development of a European standardization strategy in the update of the industrial strategy. Our results show that European and international standards foster growth for the group of countries but that national standards have ambiguous growth effects in the panel. For patents, no significant effect on growth in this group of countries is identified.

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