Competition & Innovation: Evidence from U.S. Patent and Productivity Data

Is there any evidence that innovation and technological progress are constrained by competition and fostered by monopoly power? Our results, based on a constructed dataset of U.S. manufacturing industries observed over more than two decades, suggest that this is not the case. On the contrary, using both patent statistics and productivity growth as alternative measures of innovation and technological change, we observe faster technological advances in more competitive markets. These results are robust to changes in the econometric techniques used to model nonlinearity in the competition‐innovation relationship and to alternative methods of computing market power.