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Introducing a new measure of scientific proximity between private firms and public research groups and exploiting a multi-billion euro financing program of academic clusters in France, we provide causal evidence of spillovers from academic research to private sector firms. Firms in the top quartile of exposure to the funding shock increase their R&D effort by 20% compared to the bottom quartile. We exploit reports produced by funded clusters, complemented by data on labor mobility and R&D public-private partnerships, to provide evidence on the channels for these spillovers. We show that spillovers are driven by outsourcing of R&D activities by the private to the public sectors and, to a lesser extent, by labor mobility from one to the other and by informal contacts. We discuss the policy implications of these findings.

When a technology becomes the new standard, the firms that are leaders in producing this technology have a competitive advantage. Matching the semantic content of patents to standards and exploiting the exogenous timing of standardization, we show that firms closer to the new technological frontier increase their market share and sales. In addition, if they operate in a very competitive market, these firms also increase their R&D expenses and investment. Yet, these effects are temporary since standardization creates a common technological basis for everyone, which allows followers to catch up and the economy to grow.

We use patent data to study the contribution of the US, Europe, China and Japan to frontier technology using automated patent landscaping. We find that China's contribution to frontier technology has become quantitatively similar to the US in the late 2010s while overcoming the European and Japanese contributions respectively. Although China still exhibits the stigmas of a catching up economy, these stigmas are on the downside. The quality of frontier technology patents published at the Chinese Patent Office has leveled up to the quality of patents published at the European and Japanese patent offices. At the same time, frontier technology patenting at the Chinese Patent Office seems to have been increasingly supported by domestic patentees, suggesting the build up of domestic capabilities.

Innovation is an important driver of potential growth but quantitative evidence on the dynamics of innovative activities in the long-run are hardly documented due to the lack of data, especially in Europe. In this paper, we introduce PatentCity, a novel dataset on the location and nature of patentees from the 19th century using information derived from an automated extraction of relevant information from patent documents published by the German, French, British and US Intellectual Property offices. This dataset has been constructed with the view of facilitating the exploration of the geography of innovation and includes additional information on citizenship and occupation of inventors.

We examine how corporate real estate market participants adjust to the take-off of teleworking. We develop an indicator of the exposure of counties to teleworking in France by combining teleworking capacity with incentives and frictions to its deployment. We study how this indicator relates to prices and quantities in the corporate real estate market. We find that for offices in counties more exposed, the Covid-19 crisis has led to (1) higher vacancy rates, (2) less construction, (3) lower prices. Our findings reveal that teleworking has already an impact on the office market. Furthermore, forward-looking indicators suggest that market participants are anticipating the shift to teleworking to be durable.

This article uses a survey conducted in 2019 among companies in the manufacturing sector on recruitment difficulties they may encounter. By linking this information with the companies’ income statements, we show that the companies facing these difficulties are, on average and with all other things being equal, more productive than others. This finding indicates a potential misallocation of production factors, which are not seen as a priority by the most efficient companies. A very simplified estimation suggests that these inefficiencies could reduce average productivity in the manufacturing industry by around 0.10% to 0.15%, which is low. The survey also enables us to analyse the causes of these difficulties. In addition to the problems of matching supply and demand in terms of skill levels in the labour force, the wages offered and the competition with other companies also appear to be key factors behind recruitment problems., Cet article exploite une enquête réalisée en 2019 auprès d’entreprises du secteur manufacturier sur les difficultés de recrutement qu’elles peuvent rencontrer. En mettant en relation ces informations avec leur compte de résultat, nous montrons que les entreprises confrontées à ces difficultés sont en moyenne et toutes choses égales par ailleurs plus productives que les autres. Ce résultat indique la possibilité d’une mauvaise allocation des facteurs de production, qui ne seraient pas prioritairement captés par les entreprises les plus performantes. Une estimation très simplifiée suggère que ces inefficacités pourraient réduire la productivité moyenne dans l’industrie manufacturière d’environ 0.10 % à 0.15 %, ce qui est faible. L’enquête permet également d’analyser les causes de ces difficultés. Outre les problèmes d’adéquation entre l’offre et la demande en compétence de la main-d’oeuvre, le niveau des salaires proposés et la concurrence des autres entreprises apparaissent également comme des motifs importants des problèmes de recrutement., Bergeaud Antonin, Cette Gilbert, Stary Joffrey. Difficultés de recrutement et caractéristiques des entreprises : une analyse sur données d’entreprises françaises / Recruitment Difficulties and Firms’ Characteristics: An Analysis of French Company Data. In: Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics, n°534-35, 2022. pp. 43-60.

We decompose the "China shock" into two components that induce different adjustments for firms exposed to Chinese exports: a horizontal shock affecting firms selling goods that compete with similar imported Chinese goods, and a vertical shock affecting firms using inputs similar to the imported Chinese goods. Combining French accounting, customs, and patent information at the firm-level, we show that the horizontal shock is detrimental to firms' sales, employment and innovation. Moreover, this negative impact is concentrated on low-productivity firms. By contrast, we find a positive effect - although often not significant - of the vertical shock on firms' sales, employment and innovation.

Domestic outsourcing has grown substantially in developed countries over the past two decades. This paper addresses the question of the technological drivers of this phenomenon by studying the impact of the staggered diffusion of broadband internet in France during the 2000s. Our results confirm that broadband technology increases firm productivity and the relative demand for high-skill workers. Further, we show that broad-band internet led firms to outsource some non-core occupations to service contractors, both in the low and high-skill segments. In both cases, we find that employment related to these occupations became increasingly concentrated in firms specializing in these activities, and was less likely to be performed in-house within firms specialized in other activities. As a result, after the arrival of broadband internet, establishments become increasingly homogeneous in their occupational composition. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence that high-skill workers experience salary gains from being outsourced, while low-skill workers lose out.

Does regulation affect the pace and nature of innovation and if so, by how much? We build a tractable and quantifiable endogenous growth model with size-contingent regulations. We apply this to population administrative firm panel data from France, where many labor regulations apply to firms with 50 or more employees. Nonparametrically, we find that there is a sharp fall in the fraction of innovating firms just to the left of the regulatory threshold. Further, a dynamic analysis shows a sharp reduction in the firm’s innovation response to exogenous demand shocks for firms just below the regulatory threshold. We then quantitatively fit the parameters of the model to the data, finding that innovation at the macro level is about 5.4% lower due to the regulation, a 2.2% consumption equivalent welfare loss. Four-fifths of this loss is due to lower innovation intensity per firm rather than just a misallocation towards smaller firms and lower entry. We generalize the theory to allow for changes in the direction of R&D, and find that regulation’s negative effects only matter for incremental innovation (as measured by citations and text-based measures of novelty). A more regulated economy may have less innovation, but when firms do innovate they tend to “swing for the fence” with more radical (and labor saving) breakthroughs.