On the Cyclicality of R&D Activities

Matthias Mand

VfS Annual Conference 2016 (Augsburg): Demographic Change from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: While an opportunity cost argument suggests that recessions are ideal times to undergo R&D aimed at enhancing productivity, empirical measures of U.S. R&Dactivity are procyclical. To resolve this discrepancy, I propose a calibrated real business cycle model featuring R&D-based growth through horizontal innovations. The model is used to quantitatively analyze the impact of business cycle shocks under various specifications of the R&D process. I find that the specification of R&D inputs is essential for the cyclicality of R&D activities. First, the popular knowledge-driven specification of R&D has a hard time to generate both procyclical R&D investment and procyclical R&D labor at the same time. Second, the calibrated multi-input specification generates procyclical R&D investment as well as procyclical employment of scientists. In addition, the endogenous growth mechanism gives rise to amplification of business cycle shocks.

JEL-codes: E32 O31 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-ino and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/145472/1/VfS_2016_pid_6249.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc16:145472

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VfS Annual Conference 2016 (Augsburg): Demographic Change from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().