Growth Through Heterogeneous Innovations

Ufuk Akcigit, William R. Kerr

NBER Working Paper No. 16443
Issued in November 2010
NBER Program(s):Economic Fluctuations and Growth, Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

We study how exploration versus exploitation innovations impact economic growth through a tractable endogenous growth framework that contains multiple innovation sizes, multi-product firms, and entry/exit. Firms invest in exploration R&D to acquire new product lines and exploitation R&D to improve their existing product lines. We model and show empirically that exploration R&D does not scale as strongly with firm size as exploitation R&D. The resulting framework conforms to many regularities regarding innovation and growth differences across the firm size distribution. We also incorporate patent citations into our theoretical framework. The framework generates a simple test using patent citations that indicates that entrants and small firms have relatively higher growth spillover effects.

Acknowledgments

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w16443

Published: Ufuk Akcigit & William R. Kerr, 2018. "Growth through Heterogeneous Innovations," Journal of Political Economy, vol 126(4), pages 1374-1443.