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21 publications found

  • The Innovation Premium to Soft Skills in Low-Skilled Occupations

    • Innovation

    • Labor market

    Matched employee-employer data from the UK are used to analyze the wage premium to working in an innovative firm. We find that firms that are more R&D intensive pay higher wages on average, and this is particularly true for workers in some low-skilled occupations. We propose a model in which a firm’s innovativeness is reflected […]

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  • Climate Change, Directed Innovation, and Energy Transition:The Long-run Consequences of the Shale Gas Revolution

    • Climate

    • Energy

    • Growth

    • Innovation

    We investigate the short- and long-term effects of a shale gas boom in an economy where energy can be produced with coal, natural gas, or clean energy sources. In the short run, cheaper natural gas has counteracting effects on CO2 emissions: on the one hand it allows substitution away from coal which reduces CO2 emissions, […]

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  • The Inverted-U Relationship Between Credit Access and Productivity Growth

    • Growth

    • Innovation

    • Productivity

    We identify two counteracting effects of credit access on productivity growth: on the one hand, better access to credit makes it easier for entrepreneurs to innovate; on the other hand, better credit access allows less efficient incumbent firms to remain longer on the market, thereby discouraging entry of new and potentially more efficient innovators. We […]

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  • On the Returns to Invention within Firms: Evidence from Finland

    • Innovation

    In this paper we merge individual income data, firm-level data, patenting data, and IQ data in Finland over the period 1988–2012 to analyze the returns to invention for inventors and their coworkers or stakeholders within the same firm. We find that: (i) inventors collect only 8 percent of the total private return from invention; (ii) […]

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  • The Impact of Exports on Innovation: Theory and Evidence

    • Innovation

    • Trade

    This paper investigates the effect of export shocks on innovation. On the one hand a positive shock increases market size and therefore innovation incentives for all firms. On the other hand it increases competition as more firms enter the export market. This in turn reduces profits and therefore innovation incentives particularly for firms with low […]

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  • The Role of Bounded Rationality and Imperfect Information in Subgame Perfect Implementation—An Empirical Investigation

    • Inequality

    • Innovation

    In this paper we conduct a laboratory experiment to test the extent to which Moore and Repullo’s subgame perfect implementation mechanism induces truth-telling, both in a setting with perfect information and in a setting where buyers and sellers face a small amount of uncertainty regarding the good’s value. We find that Moore–Repullo mechanisms fail to […]

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  • Environmentally-Responsible Households: Irresponsible Corporate Lobbying

    • Environment

    • Innovation

    • Lobbying

    • Working Paper

    How do firms respond to greener household preferences? We construct a novel index of environmental willingness to act on the state-quarter level based on Google Trends search data. Relating the index to firm-level information on the U.S. automotive sector from 2006 to 2019, we find ambiguous results. On average, firms redirect innovation from conventional combustion […]

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  • An Evaluation of the Innovation Tax Credit

    • Innovation

    • Publication

    The Innovation tax credit (crédit d’impôt innovation, CII) is an extension of theResearch tax credit (crédit d’impôt recherche, CIR) intended to boost the incentive effect ofthe latter on SMEs to encourage them to engage in the creation of new productsviathe developmentof prototypes or pilot plants. Introduced in 2013, it represented €120million of tax credit in […]

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    Published

    October 2021

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  • Cultivating Productivity through Regulation:The Case of Pesticide Bans in France

    • Innovation

    • Productivity

    • Regulation

    • Working Paper

    This paper examines the long-standing debate on regulation’s impact on productivity and in-novation using novel French agricultural data combining farm-level balance sheets, crop pro-tection records, and regulatory changes. The findings highlight a policy trade-off. On theone hand, when regulation bans an active substance for which no substitute is available, itcauses short-term productivity declines that mitigation […]

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    Simon Bunel

  • The Impact of Regulation on Innovation

    • Innovation

    • Regulation

    • Publication

    We present a framework that can be used to assess the equilibrium impact of regulation on endogenous innovation with heterogeneous firms. We implement this model using French firm-level panel data, where there is a sharp increase in the burden of labor regulations on companies with 50 or more employees. Consistent with the model’s qualitative predictions, […]

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    Published

    November 2023

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  • A new dataset to study a century of innovation in Europe and in the US

    • Growth

    • Innovation

    • Patent

    • Publication

    Innovation is an important driver of potential growth but quantitative evidence on the dynamics of innovative activities in the long-run are hardly documented due to the lack of data, especially in Europe. In this paper, we introduce PatentCity, a novel dataset on the location and nature of patentees from the 19th century using information derived from […]

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    Published

    January 2024

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  • Patents that Match your Standards: Firm-level Evidence on Competition, Innovation and Growth

    • Competition

    • Growth

    • Innovation

    • Patents

    • Publication

    When a technology becomes the new standard, the firms that are leaders in producingthis technology gain a competitive advantage. Matching the semantic content of patentsto standard documents, we show that firms closer to the new technology standard in-crease their market share and sales. In addition, if they operate in a competitive market,these firms also increase […]

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    Published

    June 2026

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  • Natural Language Processing and Innovation Research

    • Innovation

    • Patent

    • Text-as-Data

    • Publication

    Innovation is central to models in economics, strategy, management, and finance, yet itremains difficult to measure due to its intangible and knowledge-based nature. Recentadvancements in Natural Language Processing offer new methods to analyze textualartifacts, providing empirical insights into previously hard-to-measure aspects of inno-vation. This paper provides an overview of the current applications of these methods […]

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  • Environmental Preferences and Technological Choices: Is Market Competition Clean or Dirty?

    • Competition

    • Environment

    • Innovation

    • Publication

    We investigate the effects of consumers’ environmental concerns and market competition on firms’ decisions to innovate in “clean” technologies. Agents care about their consumption and environmental footprint; firms pursue greener products to soften price competition. Acting as complements, these forces determine R&D, pollution, and welfare. We test the theory using panel data on patents by […]

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    Published

    1, March 2023

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  • Exporting Ideas: Knowledge Flows from Expanding Trade inGoods

    • Innovation

    • Patent

    • Working Paper

    We examine the effect of entry by French firms into a new export market on thedynamics of their patents’ citations received from that destination. Applying adifference-in-differences identification strategy with a staggered treatment design, weshow that: (i) entering a new foreign market has a significant impact on the long-runflow of citations; (ii) the impact is mostly […]

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  • Good Rents versus Bad Rents: R&D Misallocation and Growth

    • Growth

    • Innovation

    • Working Paper

    Firm price-cost markups may reflect (a) bigger step sizes from qualityinnovations that confer significant knowledge spillovers onto other firms,and/or (b) higher process efficiency than competing firms or other factorswhich bear no obvious knowledge externality. We write down anendogenous growth model with innovation step size and process efficiencyas alternative sources of markup heterogeneity. We then use […]

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  • The Heterogeneous Impact of Market Size on Innovation: Evidence from French Firm-Level Exports

    • Innovation

    • Productivity

    • Trade

    • Publication

    We analyze how demand conditions faced by a firm in its export markets affect its innovation decisions. We exploit exogenous firm-level export demand shocks and find that firms respond by patenting more; furthermore, this response is driven by the subset of initially more productive firms. The patent response arises two to five years after the […]

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    Published

    May 2024

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  • Lost in Transition: Financial Barriers to Green Growth

    • Creative Destruction

    • Innovation

    • Productivity

    • Working Paper

    Green innovation offers a solution to climate change without compromising living standards. Yet theshare of climate-enhancing innovations in total patents, after booming for two decades, has seizedto grow since the Global Financial Crisis. We develop a quantitative framework in which firms direct innovation towards green or polluting technologies, and become better at innovating in technologies […]

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  • A Theory of Falling Growth and Rising Rents

    • Growth

    • Innovation

    • Publication

    Exploring strategies to ensure equitable access to quality digital education across socioeconomic divides.

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    Published

    20 february 2023

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  • Resetting the Innovation Clock: Endogenous Growth through Technological Turnover

    • Innovation

    • Working Paper

    Assessing the role of technology and data-driven governance in creating more livable and sustainable urban environments.

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    Published

    22 july 2025

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  • Innovation and Top Income Inequality

    • Inequality

    • Innovation

    • Publication

    In this article, we use cross-state panel and cross-U.S. commuting-zone data to look at the relationship between innovation, top income inequality and social mobility. We find positive correlations between measures of innovation and top income inequality. We also show that the correlations between innovation and broad measures of inequality are not significant. Next, using instrumental […]

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    Published

    June 2018

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