Essays in innovation and growth

Dyèvre, Arnaud (2024) Essays in innovation and growth. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This thesis investigates the impact of knowledge spillovers on economic growth, from both empirical and theoretical angles. It sits at the intersection of Macroeconomics, Public Economics and Economic Geography. Chapters 1 to 3 build upon my Job Market Paper. They are concerned with the consequences of the 60-year decline in publicly funded Research and Development (R&D) funding in the United States for the productivity growth of private firms. These first three chapters are organised as follows: • Chapter 1 presents a new dataset of publicly listed firms matched to patents, spanning 70 years (1950-2020), that I assembled to document that R&D funded by the federal government in the US is substantially different from private R&D. The patents it generates are more likely to rely on science, more likely to open new technological fields and, most importantly, more likely to generate technology spillovers. • Chapter 2 uses two instrumental variable specifications to estimate the impact of public R&D through spillovers on private firms’ productivities. I find that public R&D spillovers generate large and persistent increases in the productivity of private businesses, in particular small ones. Moreover, the impact of publicly funded R&D spillovers appear to be larger than those from privately funded R&D. The first instrumental variable strategy relies on historical funding shocks across US government agencies from 1950 to 2020, while the second instrument uses the random assignment of patent applications to examiners of varying leniencies to generate exogenous variation in the exposure of firms to the patents of other firms.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2024 Arnaud Dyèvre
Library of Congress subject classification:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > G Geography (General) H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions
Sets:	Departments > Economics
Supervisor:	Advani, Arun and Jaravel, Xavier and Moll, Benjamin and Van Reenen, John
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4736

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