Effects of coordinated strategies on product and process R&;D

Using a game theoretical model on firms’ simultaneous investments in product and process R&D, we advance and empirically test hypotheses on the role of externalities on the optimal R&D portfolio of cooperating firms and independently competing firms. We use Community Innovation Survey data on 3,696 Italian manufacturing firms. In line with our model we find that members of a group of firms invest significantly more into product, process, and aggregate R&D than independent firms. Further, their R&D portfolios tend to show a higher product versus process ratio. However, with regard to R&D performance and efficiency we find that independent firms are superior.      

Products and Productivity*

When firms make decisions about which product to manufacture at a more disaggregated level than observed in the data, measured firm productivity reflects both characteristics of the firm and attributes of the products that are non‐randomly chosen by the firm. This paper develops a model of industry equilibrium in which firms endogenously sort across products and characterizes the resulting bias in measured firm and aggregate productivity. Calibrating the model's parameters, we show that endogenous product selection can have quantitatively important effects on measured firm and aggregate productivity and their response to changes in parameter values.     

Skill-replacing process innovation and the labour market: Theory and evidence

I study the differential impacts of product innovation and process innovation on the labour market. Using European data from 2000 to 2018, I find that industries with proportionally more firms reporting product innovation than process innovation also tend to exhibit a lower income share of low-skilled workers. To better understand the mechanism, I develop a dynamic growth model in which firms conduct both types of innovation endogenously. In the model, product innovation introduces new intermediate goods, which tend to require high-skilled workers to implement. Process innovation simplifies existing production technologies and thereby allows firms to replace high-skilled workers with low-skilled ones. I calibrate an extended version of the model to the largest two industries in UK in 2014 and 2018, respectively. I find that product innovation has become less costly but increasingly demanding for skills, and the cost of process innovation has increased on average and become more diverse across firms.     

Labor protection and government control: Evidence from privatized firms

In this paper, we examine whether labor protection determines the decision to retain a golden share in privatized firms. Using a sample of firms privatized in developing and industrialized countries, we find a negative relation between the likelihood of observing a golden share and labor protection. However, we find that this relation does not hold in the post-financial crisis period, suggesting that the recent crisis is associated with an increase in government control. Furthermore, we show that privatized firms in countries with strong labor protection are penalized with a higher cost of equity. Overall, our results underline the importance of labor protection for an important government control mechanism, namely golden shares, as well as for equity financing costs of privatized firms.     

ARE COOPERATIVES MORE PRODUCTIVE THAN INVESTOR‐OWNED FIRMS? CROSS‐INDUSTRY EVIDENCE FROM PORTUGAL

We analyse empirically whether cooperatives and investor‐owned firms differ in terms of productive efficiency. Using rich Portuguese panel data covering a wide range of industries, we apply two different empirical approaches to estimate potential differences in productive efficiency. The results from our benchmark random‐effects model show that cooperatives are significantly less productive, on average, than investor‐owned firms, both at the aggregate level and for most of the industries considered. However, the results derived from a System‐GMM approach, which is our preferred empirical strategy, are much less conclusive, and we cannot conclude that cooperatives are generally less efficient that investor‐owned firms. With either approach, though, we find no evidence that cooperatives are more productive than investor‐owned firms in any industry.     

Wholesalers in international trade

Recent empirical research in international trade has revealed overwhelming evidence that, in all countries, a remarkably small proportion of firms report exports in Customs statistics. However, a large share of these are wholesalers. This suggests that the number of producers selling their products abroad might be much greater than that suggested by a simple count of the firms directly reporting their exports. This paper sheds light on the role of wholesalers in international trade. Our model uses very general assumptions to show that intermediated exporters may contribute significantly to the extension of countries' export opportunities. The model predicts a twofold role in international trade. First, wholesalers alleviate the difficulty of reaching less-accessible markets. Second, they help less-efficient firms to supply foreign markets, thus increasing the number of exported varieties at the aggregate level. We use French firm-level export data to provide empirical support for these two predictions.     

Why Do Prices Remain Stable in the Bubble and Bust Period?

In spite of a large swing in real output growth in the bubble and bust period, aggregate prices remained relatively stable in Japan. Empirical results show that such price rigidity can be explained by the customer market model combined with financial constraints. The degree of financial constraints that firms face in the bubble and bust period fluctuates significantly, and the impact of financial positions on firms’ prices is counter-cyclical. In booms, liquidity-abundant firms invest in market share by keeping prices down, while in a recession financially constrained firms charge a high price to locked-in customers who remain loyal. Such counter-cyclicality is clearly observed in the pricing behavior of large firms that produce differentiated goods. In contrast, small firms whose product brand is not well established in the market cannot lock in customers, and hence financial constraints do not affect their pricing decisions.     

The effect of labor market monopsony on economic growth

In this endogenous growth model, a minimum efficient scale of production and workers’ home-to-work travel costs combine to give firms monopsony power, and this monopsony power leads to slower growth. Monopsony drives the wage below the marginal product of labor. This lower wage leads to lower investment in human capital and thereby to a lower growth rate. This makes investment in human capital – and therefore the growth rate – suboptimal. We provide evidence from a cross-country panel to support our model: Urbanization, which we assume is determined by a country’s exogenous population density and cropland area, positively impacts the wage share of output; the wage share positively impacts educational attainment; higher-income countries have higher wage shares; and within-country upticks in the wage share have a positive lagged effect on the growth rate.     

Chinese competition and product variety of Indian firms

Using detailed firm-product-year data across manufacturing industries in India, and exploiting the exogenous nature of China’s entry into the WTO in 2001, we investigate the link between the impact of import penetration from China on the product variety of Indian manufacturing firms. We find: (i) robust and significant effects of product drop, with the effect coming only from competitive pressure in the domestic market; (ii) robust evidence of product drop or ‘creative destruction’ only for firms belonging to the lower-half of the size distribution; (iii) firms drop their peripheral/marginal products and concentrate on the core ones; and (iv) the result is strongest for firms producing intermediate goods. For an average Indian manufacturing firm, a 10 percentage point increase in India’s Chinese share of imports in the domestic market reduces the product scope of firms by 1.7–4.4%. In contrast, we find positive effects on product scope when firms are importing intermediate goods. We also find evidence of significant productivity effects and within-firm factor reallocation. Our results are consistent to a battery of robustness checks and IV estimation.     

Multi‐product exporters,variable markups and exchange rate fluctuations

In this paper we investigate how firms adjust markups across products in response to fluctuations in the real exchange rate. We estimate markups at the market–product–plant level using detailed panel production and cost data from Mexican manufacturing between 1994 and 2007. Exploiting variation in the real exchange rate in the aftermath of the peso crisis in December 1994, we provide robust empirical evidence that plants increase their markups and producer prices in response to a real depreciation and that this increase is greater for products with higher productivity. Thus, we provide direct evidence for the theoretical mechanism of variable markup response behind incomplete and heterogeneous exchange rate pass‐through on producer prices. Our empirical methodology allows us to decompose the producer price response to exchange rate shocks into a markup and a marginal cost component using our markup estimates. Using these estimates, we establish that marginal cost at the product–plant level increases more in response to real exchange rate depreciation if the plant has higher share of imported inputs.     

A simple model of income,aggregate demand and the process of credit creation by private banks

This paper presents a small macroeconomic model describing the main mechanisms of the process of creation by the private banking system. The model is composed of a core unit—where the dynamics of income, credit and aggregate demand are determined—and a set of sectoral accounts that ensure its stock-flow consistency. In order to grasp the role of credit and banks on the functioning of the economic system we make an explicit distinction between planned and realized variables, thanks to which, while maintaining the ex-post accounting consistency, we are able to introduce an ex-ante wedge between current aggregate income and planned expenditure. Private banks are the only economic agents capable of filling this gap through the creation of new credit. Through the use of numerical simulation we discuss the link between credit creation and the expansion of economic activity, also contributing to a recent academic debate on the relation between income, debt and aggregate demand.     

Monetary Policy, Credit and Aggregate Supply: The Evidence from Italy

This paper concerns theory and evidence of the monetary transmission mechanisms. Current research has deeply investigated factors, such as dependence of firms on bank credit, that amplify the impact of monetary policy impulses on aggregate demand exerting strong but temporary effects on output and employment. We present an intertemporal macroeconomic equilibrium model of a competitive economy where current production is financed by bank credit, and then we use it to identify supply–side effects of the credit transmission mechanism in data drawn from the Italian economy. We find evidence that the 'credit variables' identified by the model – the overnight rate as a proxy of monetary policy and a measure of credit risk – have permanent effects on employment and output by altering credit supply conditions to firms.
To save on space, mathematical proofs, statistical tests and data sources have been gathered in two separate appendices that can be examined on request.
(J.E.L.: E2, E5).     

Financial Deregulation And The Relationship Between The Economy And The Share Market In Australia

In this paper we investigate the effect of financial deregulation on the relationship between the macro-economy and the share market within the framework of a VAR using quarterly Australian data for four variables – aggregate share prices, real output, the term premium and the default premium. After an analysis of stationarity and cointegration of the variables, we specify the VAR in the first differences of the logs of share prices and output and the levels of the premia. We identify December 1983 as the most appropriate date for testing for a structural break in our model due to financial deregulation and find strong evidence supporting our hypothesis of a break at this date. We go on to estimate and simulate the model separately over two sub-samples: 1978(1)–1983(4) and 1984(1)–2001(2). While our results are not clear-cut, we find that, if anything, the deregulation of financial markets weakened the relationship between the share market and the rest of the economy.     

Employee Profit-sharing and Labor Extraction in a Classical Model of Distribution and Growth

This article sets out a classical model of economic growth in which the distribution of income features the possibility of profit-sharing with workers, as firms choose periodically between two labor-extraction compensation strategies. Workers are homogeneous with regard to labor power, and firms choose to compensate them with either only a conventional wage or a share of profits on top of this conventional wage. Empirical evidence shows that labor productivity (i.e. labor extraction) in profit-sharing firms is higher than labor productivity in non-sharing firms. The frequency distribution of labor-extraction employee compensation strategies and labor productivity across firms is time-variant, being driven by satisficing imitation dynamics from which we derive two significant results. First, heterogeneity in labor-extraction compensation strategies across firms, and hence earnings inequality across workers can be a stable long-run equilibrium outcome. Second, although convergence to a long-run equilibrium may occur with either a falling or increasing proportion of profit-sharing firms, the share of net profits in income and the rates of net profit, capital accumulation and economic growth nevertheless all converge to the highest possible long-run equilibrium values.     

Knowledge appropriability, firm size, and growth

Empirical evidence shows that the number of patents per R&D dollar declines with firm size. In this paper, we propose a Schumpeterian growth model that accounts for this evidence. We analyze an economy with firms that engage in cost-reducing innovation resulting from the accumulation of both codified and tacit knowledge: the former occurs through the purchase of patents, while the latter is the result of R&D conducted in-house by firms. We study the relation between knowledge appropriability and market structure, and we show that a shift from patents to in-house research occurs as firm size gets larger. Since innovation statistics concentrate mainly on patents, this process of research reallocation results into an under-estimation of innovative activity and is responsible for the declining ratio of patents to R&D expenditure. Survey data on UK-based firms provide support to our results.     

A corporation’s culture as an impetus for spinoffs and a driving force of industry evolution

We offer a theory of spinoffs that explains some salient aspects of these important market entrants. In infant industries, a great share of new market opportunities is depleted by firms that spinoff from incumbents. A model emphasizing the relation between incumbents’ evolving corporate cultures and the generation of spinoffs explains this regularity in industry evolution. By doing so, we capture different patterns in firm development that finally will help explain the evolutionary paths that industries may follow. We show that organizations reach a critical size that entails the collapse of a cooperative culture and triggers the exodus of personnel founding own firms. Thereby, organizations with a cooperative culture active in a dynamic business environment provide ideal training grounds for potential founders. Moreover, we argue that cooperative firm cultures and processes of “entrepreneurial imprinting” are important sources of spinoffs’ superior capabilities concerning their later market performance. We relate our findings to empirical evidence on developmental patterns in industries, such as genealogies and performance of spinoffs.     

Micro-responses to shocks: pricing,promotion, and entry*

We study the market response to firm-specific demand shocks in a natural experiment setting. In 2006, a boycott of Danish products in several Arab countries was devastating for Danish cheese products firms. In Saudi Arabia, their market share collapsed from 16.5 percent in January to below 1 percent in March, and never fully recovered; by 2009, it was 6.3 percent. By analyzing micro-level (scanner) price and sales data, we find the following. (i) Danish firms lowered prices but kept the product mix the same. (ii) Non-Danish firms kept prices constant but changed their product mix by introducing new products and new product bundles. (iii) Non-Danish firms chose to introduce products that were similar to the Danish products in characteristic space in order to compete head-to-head. We complement the analysis with a theoretical framework that helps to account for our main findings.     

Endogenous recessions: The creative destruction effect of final product novelty

In this paper we build a basic macroeconomic model aimed to grasp some aspects of the inner functioning of macroeconomic fluctuations. We highlight a mechanism through which the appearance of a product innovation results in an eventual reduction of the aggregate economic activity. When a new product appears, demand moves towards this more attractive product. The ‘creative destruction’ effect in this context is represented by the resources lost when firms producing old varieties exit the market due to the shortage of demand. Because firms producing a given product receive on average the same amount of demand, exits happen to be highly synchronized. We use this fact to explain the fluctuation asymmetries observed in real data. We test the ability of the model to meet features of real data against the United States' GDP in the 1950–1992 period.     

Export,R&D and new products. a model and a test on European industries

In this article we extend the model developed by Bogliacino and Pianta (Industrial and Corporate Change 22 649, 2013, b) on the link between R&D, innovation and economic performance, considering the impact of innovation on export success. We develop a simultaneous three equation model in order to investigate the existence of a ‘virtuous circle’ between industries’ R&D, share of product innovators and export market shares. We investigate empirically – at the industry level – three key relationships affecting the dynamics of innovation and export performance: first, the capacity of firms to translate their R&D efforts in new products; second, the role of innovation as a determinant of export market shares; third, the export success as a driver of new R&D efforts. The model is tested for 38 manufacturing and service sectors of six European countries over three time periods, from 1995 to 2010. The model effectively accounts for the dynamics of R&D efforts, innovation and international performance of European industries. Moreover, important differences across countries emerge when we split our sample into a Northern group – Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom – and a Southern group – France, Italy and Spain. We find that the ‘virtuous circle’ between innovation and competitiveness holds for Northern economies only, while Southern industries fail to translate innovation efforts into export success.     

Health spending and public pension: evidence from panel data

This article empirically investigates the determinants of aggregate health expenditure in a panel of OECD countries from 1980 to 2005. We differ from most existing studies by testing some new determinants motivated by recent theoretical advances in the literature. We find that a one percentage increase in public pension payments per elderly person leads to approximately a one third percentage increase in aggregate health spending, and this effect is significant and robust across a variety of model specifications. A back of the envelope calculation based on this estimate suggests that the expansion of the public pension programme on average accounts for approximately over one fifth of the rise in aggregate health expenditure as a share of GDP in the set of OECD countries during 1980–2005. In addition, we find that the estimated effect of GDP per capita in our model ranges from 0.66 to 0.80, which is consistent with the results from some recent studies, and thus further reinforces the finding in the literature that health care is not a luxury good.