We develop a parsimonious model of innovating firms rich enough to confront firm-level evidence. It captures the dynamic behavior of individual heterogenous firms, describes the evolution of an industry with simultaneous entry and exit, and delivers a general equilibrium model of technological change. While unifying the theoretical analysis of firms, industries, and the aggregate economy, the model yields insights into empirical work on innovating firms. It accounts for the persistence over time of firms' R&D investment, the concentration of R&D among incumbent firms, and the link between R&D and patenting. Furthermore, it explains why R&D as a fraction of revenues is strongly related to firm productivity yet largely unrelated to firm size or growth.

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We develop a parsimonious model of innovating firms rich enough to confront firm-level evidence. It captures the dynamic behavior of individual heterogenous firms, describes the evolution of an industry with simultaneous entry and exit, and delivers a general equilibrium model of technological change. While unifying the theoretical analysis of firms, industries, and the aggregate economy, the model yields insights into empirical work on innovating firms. It accounts for the persistence over time of firms' R&D investment, the concentration of R&D among incumbent firms, and the link between R&D and patenting. Furthermore, it explains why R&D as a fraction of revenues is strongly related to firm productivity yet largely unrelated to firm size or growth.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. May 25, 1998 Terms of use: Documents inAbstract: This paper presents a somewhat new econometric framework that permits simultaneous estimation of price-cost margins, scale economies and productivity from a panel of establishment data. The econometric model contains only a few, economically interesting parameters to be estimated, but it is nevertheless consistent with a°exible (translog) underlying technology, quasi-¯xed capital and the presence of persistent di®erences in productivity between establishments. The econometric framework is applied to study market power, scale economies and productivity di®erences in a number of manufacturing industries in Norway. The results reveal statistically signi¯cant, but quite small, margins between price and marginal costs in most manufacturing industries. No industry exhibits increasing returns to scale; the average plant in most industries seems to face constant or moderately decreasing returns to scale. There is more variation in market power within the fairly narrow industry groups investigated compared to the variation between the industry groups. The results show that¯rms with higher market power tend to be less productive.JEL classi¯cation: D40, C23.