In standard endogenous growth models, the higher the research e¤ort the higher is the innovation rate of the economy. Innovating, however, is a complex process that requires an entrepreneur to implement a valuable invention. Hence when research and entrepreneurial skills compete in the allocation of aggregate resources, the relation between growth and R&D is hump-shaped. This paper proposes a m...

We derive a closed form expression for the asymptotic distribution of the LIML estimator for the coefficients of both endogenous and exogenous variables in a partially identified linear structural equation. We extend previous results of Phillips (1989) and Choi and Phillips (1992) where the focus was on IV estimators. We show that partial failure of identification affects the LIML in that its m...

This paper considers irreversible investment in competing research projects with uncertain returns under a winner-takes-all patent system. Uncertainty takes two distinct forms: the technological success of the project is probabilistic, while the economic value of the patent to be won evolves stochastically over time. According to the theory of real options uncertainty generates an option value ...

The impact of size and competition on firm-level innovative activities has obtained considerable attention in developed countries, but the focus is still lacking in developing world. This paper is an attempt to contribute in this direction by including 14 Latin American countries, and by using Enterprise Survey data of the World Bank. We consider both input and output innovation to observe the ...

Innovation is becoming more and more important as a driver of economic growth. In developed countries, a diverse set of innovation indicators has been developed to monitor innovation performance and the impact of innovation policies. Developing countries have been late to jump on this bandwagon and are now faced with a set of well‐established innovation indicators that might not be that well su...

We analyze innovative activity in a general framework with time-dependent rewards and sunk costs. When firms are identical, innovation is delayed by an increase in the number of firms or a decrease in the size of the reward. When one firm has higher profit potential, it is more likely to innovate first. Our framework generalizes an all-pay auction; however, we show that under certain conditions...

When effort is multi-dimensional, firms will optimally “balance” the provision of incentives. Setting high-powered incentives along one dimension raises the returns to providing high-powered incentives along other dimensions which compete for the worker’s effort and/or attention (Holmstrom and Milgrom, 1991). We test for this effect in the context of for-profit pharmaceutical laboratories using...

We study university projects and research collaboration projects with industry that are supported by government grants. First, we propose a theoretical model to analyze optimal decisions in these ventures. Second, we test our theoretical results with a unique dataset containing academic publications and collaborative research funds for all the academics at the major engineering departments in t...