The Impact of Research and Development on Quality, Productivity, and Welfare

产品质量和生产方法的创新是人均产出长期增长的主要来源。在这个全球化时期，理解研发投资(R&D)如何带来创新是非常重要的。许多国家补贴旨在使公司在世界市场上更具竞争力的活动。对研发问题的经验性回答要求人们量化需求如何随着新产品的推出而变化，以及供给如何随着生产创新而变化。直到最近，几乎所有关于这些问题的研究都使用综合了价格和数量的数据，因此衡量产量的标准是工厂层面的收入。将工厂产品的价格和数量汇总在一起，混淆了需求和供应的影响，破坏了可以从这些数据中得出的结论。最近的工厂级调查包括每种产品销售收入和数量的公司级数据，以及用于生产和产品与工艺相关研发的投入数据。这项研究议程将制定一种方法，利用这些新的、更丰富的数据集来估计需求、产出生产和创新的生产。应用这一方法将产生可用于回答一些与研发相关的长期问题的估计。这篇文献中的一个主要问题是，从社会的角度来看，企业的研发是太少还是太多，因为经济学理论认为，力量可以双向发挥作用。其他重要的问题包括：研发如何通过详细的投入衡量来“产生”创新，研发知识的溢出如何影响增长，以及过去用更汇总的数据回答这些问题的方法是否会导致关于研发与增长之间关系的正确或错误的推论。更广泛的影响：为了鼓励企业在这个全球化时代变得更具竞争力，包括美国在内的许多国家补贴研发。通过提供上述问题的答案，这项研究将为分配这些补贴的最有效方式提供新的线索。这些数据还来自欧盟关税下降的时期，这使得我们有可能探索日益激烈的竞争如何影响研发决策，以及这些决策如何影响产品和工艺创新以及国内企业的竞争力。这些技术将在STATA中编程并公开使用，这样其他国家收集类似数据的研究人员就可以直接应用新方法。

Innovations in product quality and production methods are a major source of long run growth in output per capita. During this period of globalization it is very important to understand how investment in research and development (R&D) leads to innovations. Many countries subsidize activities that are intended to make firms more competitive in the world market. Empirical answers to questions regarding R&D require one to quantify how demand changes in response to the introduction of new goods and how supply changes in response to innovations in production. Until recently almost all research on these questions use data that aggregate over prices and quantities so the measure of output is plant-level revenue. Aggregating prices and quantities over products at the plant confounds the effects of demand and supply, undermining the conclusions that can be drawn from such data. More recent plant-level surveys include firm-level data on both the revenues and quantities of each product sold, in addition to data on inputs used in production and for product and process-related R&D. This research agenda will develop a methodology for estimating demand, output production and the production of innovations using these new and richer data sets. Applying the methodology will yield estimates that can be used to answer some of the long-standing questions related to R&D. A leading question in this literature is whether firms are doing too little or too much R&D from society's perspective, as economic theory says that forces can work in both directions. Other important questions include how R&D "produces" innovations as a function of detailed input measurements, how spillovers of R&D knowledge impact growth, and whether past approaches to answering these questions with more aggregated data led to correct or mistaken inferences about the relationship between R&D and growth.Broader Impacts: In an attempt to encourage firms to become more competitive in this age of globalization many countries, including the United States, subsidize R&D. By providing answers to the above questions, this research will shed new light on the most effective way to allocate these subsidies. The data also come from a period when European Union tariffs were falling, making it possible to explore how stiffening competition affects R&D decisions, and how these decisions affect product and process innovations and the competitiveness of domestic firms. The techniques will be programmed in Stata and made publicly available so researchers in other countries that collect similar data can directly apply the new methods.