Periodic Reporting for period 4 - IFDG (INNOVATION, FIRM DYNAMICS AND GROWTH: what do we learn from French firm-level data?)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2023-03-01 do 2023-08-31
A first issue we have explored, is that of growth measurement and the secular stagnation enigma. See (1) and (2). A second issue we investigated is that of the interplay between trade and innovation. A first study explored the effects of exports on innovation. [3] A second study looks at the effects of import shocks on French firms’ innovation incentives. [4]A third study combines French firm-level accounting data, patent data and customs data, to confirm the existence of knowledge spillovers induced by trade linkages. [5] Finally, a fourth study looks at the extent to which US firms react more to increased competition from China by lobbying more.
A third issue which we explored in the context of this ERC grant, is the issue of social mobility. We used newly accessible administrative data for research purposes to document the income social mobility in France over the last decades. [6]
A fourth issue is that of innovation diffusion worldwide. Thus, in a new exciting project developed in our Centre, Bergeaud and Verluise (2021), use modern Natural Language Processing to extract key patentees’ data (location, occupation, citizenship) from German (including East German), French, British and US patents since the late 19th century. While such data were inexistent (except for the US) before 1980, the authors were able to create a precise understanding of the dynamics of the diffusion of innovation since the 19th century in these four technology leaders. In an ongoing work, Verluise and Bergeaud also focus on the diffusion of breakthrough innovation in the recent period. [7]
References :
[1] See Aghion, P., Bergeaud, A., Boppart, T., Klenow, P. J., & Li, H. (2019). Missing growth from creative destruction. American Economic Review, 109(8), 2795-2822 and Aghion, P., Bergeaud, A., Boppart, T., & Bunel, S. (2018). Firm dynamics and growth measurement in France. Journal of the European Economic Association, 16(4), 933-956.
[2] See Aghion, P., Bergeaud, A., Boppart, T., Klenow, P. J., & Li, H. (2019). A theory of falling growth and rising rents (No. w26448). National Bureau of Economic Research.
[3] See Aghion, P., Bergeaud, A., Lequien, M., & Melitz, M. J. (2018). The impact of exports on innovation: Theory and evidence (p. 678). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.
[4] See Aghion, P., Bergeaud, A., Lequien, M., Melitz, M. J & Zuber, T. (2021) The Vertical and Horizontal Components of the China Shock: Firm-Level Evidence from France
[5] See Aghion, P., Bergeaud, A., Gigout, T. Lequien, M. & Melitz, M. J (2020) Exporting ideas: Knowledge Flows from Expanding Trade in Goods
[6] See Aghion, P., Ciornohuz, V., Gravoueille, M., & Stantcheva, S. (2019). Reforms and Dynamics of Income Evidence Using New Panel Data.
[7] See Bergeaud, A., Verluise, C. (2021). One Century of Innovation in Europe and the US: New Data and Facts, Working Paper.
The project on the impact of foreign competition on firms lobbying behavior has first consisted in collecting the datasets on lobbying expenditures, firms' financial information, patents and trade flows from different sources. We have then cleaned and matched the different datasets. An important amount of time is being used to simulate numerically this model. Regarding our Innovation Diffusion research programme, we started by an in-depth review of existing approaches to extract and organize unstructured text data. State-of-the art models from Natural Language Processing were then implemented in the specific context of patent data to create novel datasets. Results have been shared publicly and disseminated through conferences and workshops. The data have since been continuously improved through open-source collaboration. Major insights and findings from these novel data have been compiled in two working papers (Verluise et al, 2020; Bergeaud and Verluise, 2021), shedding new lights on the empirical measurement of knowledge flows and on the long run dynamics of innovation in Europe.