We analyze the link between R&D, innovation, and productivity in MSMEs with a special focus on micro firms with fewer than 10 employees; usually constituting the majority of firms in industrialized economies. Using the German KfW SME panel, we examine to what extent micro firms are different...

Can the existence of positive productivity spillovers between co-workers be explained by the presence of complementarities in a firm's production function? A simple model demonstrates that this is possible when workers perform their tasks sequentially and part of individuals' pay is determined...

Teamwork in research has been on the rise and so has the size of R&D teams. This paper offers an explanation for increasing team size that we call the "racing against time" hypothesis: With innovation races more competitive globally, R&D firms need to finish research projects as quickly as...

Longitudinal micro-data derived from transaction level information about wage and vendor payments made by federal grants on multiple U.S. campuses are being developed in a partnership involving researchers, university administrators, representatives of federal agencies, and others. This paper...

We review and condense the body of literature on the economic returns of public R&D on private R&D and find that: (i) private returns to R&D appear to be large and larger than the returns to alternative investments; (ii) private R&D and R&D subsidies are positively correlated and there is no...

A fast-growing literature shows that digital technologies are displacing labor from routine tasks, raising concerns that labor is racing against the machine. We develop a task-based framework to estimate the aggregate labor demand and employment effects of routine-replacing technological change...

This paper examines an economy with a large number of industries, each producing a different good. Technological change follows a Poisson process where firms improve their productivity through investment in R&D. The less there are firms in the economy or the more they can coordinate their...

This paper discusses the link between R&D and productivity across the European industrial and service sectors. The empirical analysis is based on both the European sectoral OECD data and on a unique micro longitudinal database consisting of 532 top European R&D investors. The main conclusions...