Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: What Does Innovation Tell Us about Market Concentration?

本项目探讨了企业创新在解释美国经济中市场集中度不断提高的趋势中的作用。它利用研究和开发调查以及生产方面活动的数据，衡量公司一级的创新投入和产出。利用这些详细的数据，该项目记录了创新活动的集中度及其随时间的演变，其中集中度创新被衡量为企业规模与研发投入和研究生产率之间的关系。本研究通过区分内部创新和外部创新这两种创新类型，进一步研究创新集中度对总体经济的影响。前者衡量企业对自身产品质量的改进，后者衡量企业试图从其他企业的产品线中获得市场份额。然后，通过基于研发的增长模型的透镜，研究创新集中对每种创新的总体增长和社会福利的影响。 该项目通过每种创新的投入产出比来衡量企业一级的研发生产率。为了区分内部和外部创新，该项目利用了研发调查中关于产品创新的独特信息以及产品层面销售的数据。创新集中度，然后估计预测的R D变量的措施，企业规模，同时控制企业的特点。公司层面的创新的测量模式是用来区分竞争的R D为基础的理论，市场集中度上升。该项目进一步评估了目前经历的集中对总体增长和福利的影响。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

AbstractThis project explores the role of firm innovation in explaining the recent trend of increasing market concentration in the U.S. economy. It measures innovation input and output at the firm-level using research and development (R&D) surveys together with data on production-side activities. Using this detailed data, the project documents the concentration of innovation activity and its evolution over time, where the concentration innovation is measured as the relation between firm size and R&D inputs and research productivity. The project further investigates the impact of innovation concentration on the aggregate economy by distinguishing between two types of innovation---internal and external innovation. The former measures firms’ quality improvements of their own products, and the latter measures firms’ attempts to gain market share from other firms’ product lines. The project then studies the impact of innovation concentration on aggregate growth and social welfare for each type of innovation through the lens of an R&D-based growth model. The project measures firm-level R&D productivity by the input-output ratio for each type of innovation. To distinguish between internal and external innovation, the project leverages unique information on product innovation from the R&D surveys together with data on product-level sales. Innovation concentration is then estimated by projecting R&D variables on measures of firm size while controlling for firm characteristics. The measured patterns of firm-level innovation are used to differentiate between competing R&D based theories of rising market concentration. The project further estimates the impact of currently experienced concentration on aggregate growth and welfare.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.