 Growth through ExperimentationMarkus Poschke and Alain Gabler () No 643, 2011 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Abstract: Recent empirical research has documented the importance of shocks to firm- specific productivity, but has provided only limited evidence on their sources. This paper proposes and analyzes purposeful experimentation by firms as a source of such shocks and models industry dynamics in such a setting. We thereby make two contributions. The first is conceptual and consists in providing a microfoundation to the stochastic process for firm-level productivity typically specified in the macroeconomic literature with firm heterogeneity. The second consists in quantifying the importance of experimentation for aggregate productivity growth to which experimentation, as a generalized form of R&D, contributes. We show that in a setting that allows for growth through experimentation, through market selection among firms and because of other sources, 45% of aggregate productivity growth can be attributed to experimentation. As a consequence, allocative distortions may not just reduce the level of productivity, but also have a substantial effect on growth rates. Date: 2011 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:red:sed011:643 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in 2011 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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