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，了解研究和开发（R&amp；D）的投资如何导致创新是非常重要的。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。关于研发问题的实证答案要求人们量化需求如何随着新产品的引入而变化，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了价格和数量的总和数据，因此产出的衡量标准是工厂层面的收入。在工厂里，把价格和数量加在产品上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。最近的工厂级调查包括每一种产品销售收入和数量的公司级数据，以及用于生产和与产品和工艺有关的研发的投入的数据。这项研究议程将开发一种方法，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。应用该方法将产生可用于回答与研发有关的一些长期存在的问题的估计。这些文献中的一个主要问题是，从社会的角度来看，企业在研发方面做得太少还是太多，正如经济理论所说，力量可以双向发挥作用。其他重要的问题包括研发如何作为详细投入测量的函数“产生”创新，研发知识的溢出如何影响增长，以及过去用更多汇总数据回答这些问题的方法是否导致了对研发与增长之间关系的正确或错误推断。更广泛的影响：为了鼓励企业在这个全球化时代变得更有竞争力，包括美国在内的许多国家都在补贴研发。通过对上述问题的回答，本研究将为如何最有效地分配这些补贴提供新的思路。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公司的竞争力。这些技术将在Stata进行编程并向公众开放，以便其他国家收集到类似数据的研究人员可以直接应用这些新方法。

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.