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R&D and Productivity

The Econometric Evidence

Zvi Griliches, a world-renowned pioneer in the field of productivity growth, has compiled in a single volume his pathbreaking research on R&D and productivity. Griliches addresses the relationship between research and development (R&D) and productivity, one of the most complex yet vital issues in today’s business world. Using econometric techniques, he establishes this connection and measures its magnitude for firm-, industry-, and economy-level data.

Griliches began his studies of productivity growth during the 1950s, adding a variable of "knowledge stock" to traditional production function models, and his work has served as the point of departure for much of the research into R&D and productivity. This collection of essays documents both Griliches’s distinguished career as well as the history of this line of thought.

As inputs into production increasingly taking the form of "intellectual capital" and new technologies that are not as easily measured as traditional labor and capital, the methods Griliches has refined and applied to R&D become crucial to understanding today’s economy.


400 pages | 23 line drawings, 81 tables | 6 x 9 | © 1998

National Bureau of Economic Research Monograph

Economics and Business: Economics--Development, Growth, Planning, Economics--General Theory and Principles

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1: Introduction

I: The Conceptual Framework

2: Issues in Assessing the Contribution of Research and Development to Productivity Growth

II: R&D and Productivity at the Firm Level: The Evidence

3: Returns to Research and Development Expenditures in the Private Sector
4: Productivity, R&D, and Basic Research at the Firm Level in the 1970s
5: Productivity and R&D at the Firm Level
6: Productivity Growth and R&D at the Business Level: Results from the PIMS Data Base
7: Comparing Productivity Growth: An Exploration of French and U.S. Industrial and Firm Data
8: R&D and Productivity Growth: Comparing Japanese and U.S. Manufacturing Firms

III: R&D and Productivity at the Industry Level

9: R&D and Productivity Growth at the Industry Level: Is There Still a Relationship?
10: Interindustry Technology Flows and Productivity Growth: A Reexamination
11: The Search for R&D Spillovers
12: R&D and Productivity: The Unfinished Business

IV: Patent Statistics

13: Patent Statistics as Economic Indicators: A Survey

V: Interim Conclusions

14: Productivity, R&D, and the Data Constraint

Author Index
Subject Index

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