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Growth is Getting Harder to Find, Not Ideas
April 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-21
Relatively flat US output growth versus rising numbers of US researchers is often interpreted as evidence that "ideas are getting harder to find." We build a new 46-year panel tracking the universe of U.S. firms' patenting to investigate the micro underpinnings of this claim, separately examining the relationships between research inputs and ideas (patents) versus ideas and growth. Over our sample period, we find that researchers' patenting productivity is increasing, there is little evidence of any secular decline in high-quality patenting common to all firms, and the link between patents and growth is present, differs by type of idea, and is fairly stable. On the other hand, we find strong evidence of secular decreases in output unrelated to patenting, suggesting an important role for other factors. Together, these results invite renewed empirical and theoretical attention to the impact of ideas on growth. To that end, our patent-firm bridge, which will be available to researchers with approved access, is used to produce new, public-use statistics on the Business Dynamics of Patenting Firms (BDS-PF).
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Competition, Firm Innovation, and Growth under Imperfect Technology Spillovers
July 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-40
We study how friction in learning others' technology, termed 'imperfect technology spillovers,' incentivizes firms to use different types of innovation and impacts the implications of competition through changes in innovation composition. We build an endogenous growth model in which multi-product firms enhance their products via internal innovation and enter new product markets through external innovation. When learning others' technology takes time due to this friction, increased competitive pressure leads firms with technological advantages to intensify internal innovation to protect their markets, thereby reducing others' external innovation. Using the U.S. administrative firm-level data, we provide regression results supporting the model predictions. Our findings highlight the importance of strategic firm innovation choices and changes in their composition in shaping the aggregate implications of competition.
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Grassroots Design Meets Grassroots Innovation: Rural Design Orientation and Firm Performance
March 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-17
The study of grassroots design'applying structured, creative processes to the usability or aesthetics of a product without input from professional design consultancies'remains under investigated. If design comprises a mediation between people and technology whereby technologies are made more accessible or more likely to delight, then the process by which new grassroots inventions are transformed into innovations valued in markets cannot be fully understood. This paper uses U.S. data on the design orientation of respondents in the 2014 Rural Establishment Innovation Survey linked to longitudinal data on the same firms to examine the association between design, innovation, and employment and payroll growth. Findings from the research will inform questions to be investigated in the recently collected 2022 Annual Business Survey (ABS) that for the first time contains a Design module.
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Starting Up AI
March 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-09R
Using comprehensive administrative data on business applications over the period 2004- 2023, we study business applications (ideas) and the resulting startups that aim to develop AI technologies or produce goods or services that use, integrate, or rely on AI. The annual number of new AI-related business applications is stable between 2004 and 2011, but begins to rise in 2012 with further increases from 2016 onward into the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond, with a large, discrete jump in 2023. The distribution of these applications is highly uneven across states and sectors. AI business applications have a higher likelihood of becoming employer startups compared to other applications. Moreover, businesses originating from these applications exhibit higher revenue, average wage, and labor share, but similar labor productivity and lower survival rate, compared to other businesses. While it is still early in the diffusion of AI, the rapid rise in AI business applications, combined with the better performance of resulting businesses in several key outcomes, suggests a growing contribution from AI-related business formation to business dynamism.
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Are Immigrants More Innovative? Evidence from Entrepreneurs
November 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-56
We evaluate the contributions of immigrant entrepreneurs to innovation in the U.S. using linked survey-administrative data on 199,000 firms with a rich set of innovation measures and other firm and owner characteristics. We find that not only are immigrants more likely than natives to own businesses, but on average their firms display more innovation activities and outcomes. Immigrant owned firms are particularly more likely to create completely new products, improve previous products, use new processes, and engage in both basic and applied R&D, and their efforts are reflected in substantially higher levels of patents and productivity. Immigrant owners are slightly less likely than natives to imitate products of others and to hire more employees. Delving into potential explanations of the immigrant-native differences, we study other characteristics of entrepreneurs, access to finance, choice of industry, immigrant self-selection, and effects of diversity. We find that the immigrant innovation advantage is robust to controlling for detailed characteristics of firms and owners, it holds in both high-tech and non-high-tech industries and, with the exception of productivity, it tends to be even stronger in firms owned by diverse immigrant-native teams and by diverse immigrants from different countries. The evidence from nearly all measures that immigrants tend to operate more innovative and productive firms, together with the higher share of business ownership by immigrants, implies large contributions to U.S. innovation and growth.
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A Tale of Two Fields? STEM Career Outcomes
October 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-53
Is the labor market for US researchers experiencing the best or worst of times? This paper analyzes the market for recently minted Ph.D. recipients using supply-and-demand logic and data linking graduate students to their dissertations and W2 tax records. We also construct a new dissertation-industry 'relevance' measure, comparing dissertation and patent text and linking patents to assignee firms and industries. We find large disparities across research fields in placement (faculty, postdoc, and industry positions), earnings, and the use of specialized human capital. Thus, it appears to simultaneously be a good time for some fields and a bad time for others.
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Patents, Innovation, and Market Entry
September 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-45
Do patents facilitate market entry and job creation? Using a 2014 Supreme Court decision that limited patent eligibility and natural language processing methods to identify invalid patents, I find that large treated firms reduce job creation and create fewer new establishments in response, with no effect on new firm entry. Moreover, companies shift toward innovation aimed at improving existing products consistent with the view that patents incentivize creative destruction.
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Where Have All the "Creative Talents" Gone?
Employment Dynamics of US Inventors
April 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-17
How are inventors allocated in the US economy and does that allocation affect innovative capacity? To answer these questions, we first build a model where an inventor with a new idea has the possibility to work for an entrant or incumbent firm. Strategic considerations encourage the incumbent to hire the inventor, offering higher wages, and then not implement her idea. We then combine data on 760 thousand U.S. inventors with the LEHD data. We find that when an inventor is hired by an incumbent, their earnings increases by 12.6 percent and their innovative output declines by 6 to 11 percent.
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On The Role of Trademarks: From Micro Evidence to Macro Outcomes
March 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-16R
What are the effects of trademarks on the U.S. economy? Evidence from comprehensive micro data on trademark registrations and outcomes for U.S. employer firms suggests that trademarks protect firm value and are linked to higher firm growth and marketing activity. Motivated by this evidence, trademarks are introduced in a general equilibrium framework to quantify their aggregate effects. Firms invest in product quality and engage in both informative and persuasive advertising to build a customer base subject to depreciation. Persuasive advertising induces a perception of higher quality. Firms can register trademarks to reduce customer depreciation and enhance product awareness. The model's predictions about trademark registrations, firm growth, and advertising expenditures align with the empirical evidence. The analysis shows that, compared to the counterfactual economy without trademarks, the U.S. economy with trademarks generates higher average product quality but lower variety, ultimately resulting in greater welfare and higher industry concentration. While informative advertising improves welfare, persuasive advertising reduces it. Nevertheless, the positive welfare impact of trademarks outweighs the negative effects of persuasive advertising.
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Measuring the Characteristics and Employment Dynamics of U.S. Inventors
September 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-43
Innovation is a key driver of long run economic growth. Studying innovation requires a clear view of the characteristics and behavior of the individuals that create new ideas. A general lack of rich, large-scale data has constrained such analyses. We address this by introducing a new dataset linking patent inventors to survey, census, and administrative microdata at the U.S. Census Bureau. We use this data to provide a first look at the demographic characteristics, employer characteristics, earnings, and employment dynamics of inventors. These linkages, which will be available to researchers with approved access, dramatically increases the scope of what can be learned about inventors and innovative activity.
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