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。 在这个全球化的时期，了解研究和开发投资如何导致创新是非常重要的。 许多国家对旨在使公司在世界市场上更具竞争力的活动给予补贴。 关于研发问题的实证答案需要一个量化的需求如何变化，以响应新产品的推出和供应如何变化，以响应生产的创新。直到最近，几乎所有关于这些问题的研究都使用价格和数量汇总的数据，因此产出的衡量标准是工厂层面的收入。将工厂产品的价格和数量加在一起，混淆了需求和供应的影响，破坏了从这些数据中得出的结论。 最近的工厂一级调查包括公司一级关于每种产品销售收入和数量的数据，以及关于生产中使用的投入和与产品和工艺有关的研发的数据。这一研究议程将制定一种方法，利用这些新的和更丰富的数据集来估计需求、产出和创新成果。 应用这一方法将得出一些估计数，这些估计数可用来回答一些长期存在的与研发有关的问题。 在这些文献中，一个主要的问题是，从社会的角度来看，企业是做得太少还是太多的研发，因为经济理论说，力量可以在两个方向上发挥作用。 其他重要的问题包括，作为详细的投入测量的函数，研发如何“产生”创新，研发知识的溢出效应如何影响增长，以及过去用更汇总的数据回答这些问题的方法是否导致了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：为了鼓励企业在全球化时代变得更有竞争力，包括美国在内的许多国家都对研发进行了补贴。 通过回答上述问题，这项研究将为分配这些补贴的最有效方式提供新的启示。这些数据也来自欧盟关税下降的时期，因此有可能探讨竞争加剧如何影响研发决策，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中编程并公开提供，以便收集类似数据的其他国家的研究人员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.