The findings in this paper provide some insight into how small firms are able to innovate. Using a production function approach to relate knowledge generating inputs to innovative output, the empirical results suggest that small firms are the recipients of R&D spillovers from knowledge generated...

Whether diversity or specialization of economic activity better promotes technological change and subsequent economic growth has been the subject of a heated debate in the economics literature. The purpose of this paper is to consider the effect of the composition of economic activity on...

Major economic transitions, even when they are disruptive, do not occur instantaneously but rather occur over time, as regions within a country change at different rates. Accordingly, these dynamics may be reflected in a geographic lifecycle with different regions characterized by different...

The purpose of this paper is to link the propensity for innovative activity to cluster spatially to the stage of the industry life cycle. The theory of knowledge spillovers, based on the knowledge production function for innovative activity, suggests that geographic proximity matters most in...

The authors test whether a measure of patent activity in the United States is a reliable proxy for innovative activity. They introduce a production function for patented inventions based on knowledge, firm size, and the ease of appropriability. The results are then compared with those from their...

The hypothesis that the relative innovative advantage between large and small firms is determined by market concentration, the extent of entry barriers, the composition of firm size within the industry, and the overall importance of innovation activity is tested. The authors find that large...

The authors present a model suggesting that innovative output is influenced by R&D and market struc ture characteristics. Using a new and direct measure of innovation in a cross-section regression model estimating the total number of inno vations and large- and small-firm innovations, they find...

A cross-section empirical analysis examining the entry behavior of small firms is provided in this paper. While the authors find that certain traditional market structure characteristics and entry barriers have a strong impact on small-firm entry behavior, the reliance upon innovative strategy...

New-firm startup activity is examined within a framework pooling a cross-section of 117 industries over six time periods between 1976 and 1986. A model is introduced relating startup activity both to elements of the business cycle, in particular the macroeconomic growth rate, the cost of...