Innovation is commonly seeb as the principal engine of economic development. In this paper, we investigate the microfoundations of economic growth by relating innovation to sales growth at the firm-level, for incumbent firms in four "complex technology" sectors. The average firm, which...

How do financial markets respond to firms' efforts at innovation ? To answer this question, we mesure innovation by creating a synthetic indicator based on a firm's recent history of R&D expenditure and patent applications. We focus on four 2-digit "complex technology" manufacturing sectors that...

A robust feature of the corporate growth process is the exponential distribution of firm growth rates. This striking empirical regularity has been found to hold for a number of different datasets and at different levels of aggregation. In this paper, we propose a simple theoretical model capable...

Serial correlation in annual growth rates carries a lot of information on growth processes - it allows us to directly observe firm performance as well asto test hypotheses. Using a 7-year balanced panel of 10 000 French manufacturing firms, we observe that small firms typically are subject to...