The effect of research and development (R&D) expenditure on firm output is an interesting topic, but hardly explored in developing countries due to the unavailability of data. This study investigates this topic in the context of Vietnam by utilizing a novel dataset of 343 firms listed on the Vietnam Stock Exchange in the 2010-2018 period. The effect of R&D expenditure is examined under the production function framework. In order to obtain the robustness of the quantitative results, we estimate the production function with two coherent techniques including the OLS and 2-SLS. An instrumental variable regression technique is adopted to avoid the endogeneity problem between R&D expenditure and other variables. In our empirical analysis, we find that R&D expenditure has a positive and significant impact on output growth. The finding is robust in both OLS and 2-SLS frameworks. Besides, the output elasticity to R&D expenditure of our result is much higher than the estimated elasticity of other countries. The results imply that a 1% increase in R&D expenditure in Vietnam will help to expand the output more than a 1% increase in R&D investment in other countries. The findings from our paper provide important implications for firm managers, investors, and policymakers in Vietnam.