201 research outputs found
Tapping into talent: coupling education and innovation policies for economic growth
No full textHow do innovation and education policy affect individual career choices and aggregate productivity? This paper analyzes the effect of R&D subsidies and higher education policy on productivity growth through the supply of innovative talent. We put scarce talent, higher education attainment, and career choice at the center of a new endogenous growth framework with individual-level heterogeneity in talent, financial resources, and preferences. We link the model to micro-level data from Denmark on the backgrounds of who obtains a PhD and becomes an inventor and the outcomes of a set of policy interventions. We find that R&D subsidies can be strengthened when combined with higher education subsidies, which enable talented but poor youth to pursue a career in research. Education and innovation policies not
only alleviate different frictions, but also impact innovation at different time horizons. Education policy is more effective in societies with higher income inequality
The economics of creative destruction: new research on themes from Aghion and Howitt
No full textA stellar cast of economists examines the roles of creative destruction in addressing today’s most important political and social questions. Inequality is rising, growth is stagnant while rents accumulate, the environment is suffering, and the COVID-19 pandemic exposed every crack in the systems of global capitalism. How can we restart growth? Can our societies be made fairer? Editors Ufuk Akcigit and John Van Reenen assemble a world-leading group of social scientists and theorists to consider these questions and, in particular, how ideas about the economics of creative destruction may help solve the problems we face. Most closely associated with Joseph Schumpeter, formalized by Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt in the 1990s, the idea of innovation as creative destruction has become foundational in economics, reaching into almost every corner of the discipline—both theoretically and empirically. Now, at a time of rapid and disorienting change, is an opportune moment to pull the disparate strands of research together to assess what has been learned and continue an intellectual project that can aid economic decision-making in the decades to come. The cutting-edge work in The Economics of Creative Destruction focuses on innovation and growth. Contributors offer illuminating insights into monopoly and inequality, the nature of the social safety net, climate change, and the ups and downs of regulation. Collectively, they suggest that governance has a role to play in capitalism, maximizing its benefits and minimizing its risks
Back to Basics: Basic Research Spillovers, Innovation Policy, and Growth
No full textThis paper introduces a general equilibrium model of endogenous technical change through basic and applied research. Basic research differs from applied research in the nature and the magnitude of the generated spillovers. We propose a novel way of empirically identifying these spillovers and embed them in a framework with private firms and a public research sector. After characterizing the equilibrium, we estimate our model using micro-level data on research expenditures by French firms. Our key finding is that uniform research subsidies can accentuate the dynamic misallocation in the economy by oversubsidizing applied research. Policies geared towards public basic research and its interaction with the private sector are significantly welfare-improving
Growth through Heterogeneous Innovations
No full textCitation: Akcigit, Ufuk, and William R. Kerr. "Growth Through Heterogeneous Innovations." Journal of Political Economy 126, no. 4 (August 2018): 1374–1443.
Publisher's link: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/697901
Other link where paper is available: https://www.nber.org/papers/w16443.pdf
Keywords: Patents, Innovation Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Economic Growth, Research and Development, ScienceWe build a tractable growth model where multi-product incumbents invest in internal innovations to improve their existing products, while new entrants and incumbents invest in external innovations to acquire new product lines. External and internal innovations generate heterogeneous innovation qualities, and firm size affects innovation incentives. This framework allows us to analyze how different types of innovation contribute to economic growth and how the firm size distribution can have important consequences for the types of innovations realized. Our model aligns with many observed empirical regularities, and we quantify our framework by matching Census Bureau operating data with patent data for U.S. firms. We observe that internal innovation scales moderately faster with firm size than external innovation.Author's Origina
The Role of Information in Competitive Experimentation
No full textTechnological progress is typically a result of trial-and-error research by competing firms. While some research paths lead to the innovation sought, others result in dead ends. Because firms benefit from their competitors working in the wrong direction, they do not reveal their dead-end findings. Time and resources are wasted on projects that other firms have already found to be dead ends. Consequently, technological progress is slowed down, and the society benefits from innovations with delay, if ever. To study this prevalent problem, we build a tractable two-arm bandit model with two competing firms. The risky arm could potentially lead to a dead end and the safe arm introduces further competition to make firms keep their dead-end findings private. We characterize the equilibrium in this decentralized environment and show that the equilibrium necessarily entails significant efficiency losses due to wasteful dead-end replication and a flight to safety – an early abandonment of the risky project. Finally, we design a dynamic mechanism where firms are incentivized to disclose their actions and share their private information in a timely manner. This mechanism restores efficiency and suggests a direction for welfare improvement.
Replication package for: "Tapping into Talent: Coupling Education and Innovation Policies for Economic Growth"
No full text<p>This package contains the code necessary to reproduce the figures and tables in Akcigit, Pearce, Prato, “Tapping into Talent: Coupling Education and Innovation Policies for Economic Growth.” Review of Economic Studies. Instructions are also given for accessing the raw data.</p>
Creative destruction for growth and change
No full textJohn Van Reenen introduces his new book, The Economics of Creative Destruction, co-edited with Ufuk Akcigit, which explores how technological innovation can be used to drive growth and tackle problems from inequality to climate change. The Economics of Creative Destruction. Ufuk Akcigit and John Van Reenen (eds.). Harvard University Press. 2023
Immigration and the Rise of American Ingenuity
No full text We build on the analysis in Akcigit, Grigsby, and Nicholas (2017) by using US patent and census data to examine the relationship between immigration and innovation. We construct a measure of foreign born expertise and show that technology areas where immigrant inventors were prevalent between 1880 and 1940 experienced more patenting and citations between 1940 and 2000. The contribution of immigrant inventors to US innovation was substantial. We also show that immigrant inventors were more productive than native born inventors; however, they received significantly lower levels of labor income. The immigrant inventor wage-gap cannot be explained by differentials in productivity. </jats:p
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