Firm size distribution and economic growth

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 25380220
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Economic theory
• Research Institution: Waseda University
• Principal Investigator: Oikawa Koki 早稲田大学, 社会科学総合学術院, 准教授 (90468728)
• Project Period (FY): 2013-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: イノベーション / 技術空間上の企業分布

Outline of Final Research Achievements

We construct a new method to describe firm distributions within technology fields and the dynamic behavior of these distributions. To locate firms on a technology space, we apply multidimensional scaling for the inter-firm technological dissimilarity matrices that are computed from patent citation overlaps among firms using the NBER US patent dataset. Our estimated firm distributions show increasing trends in technological distance and polarization on average, where we follow Duclos and et al. (2004) to measure polarization. We construct a model of inter-group competition in which polarization stimulates R&D incentives. The model fits data before the major patent reform in the United States in 1980s and polarization increases citation-weighted number of patent applications. After about 1990, the impact of polarization is reversed.

Free Research Field

マクロ経済学、企業動学