This award will support continued collaborative research on the topic of industrial productivity between Dr. Zvi Griliches, Harvard University and Dr. Jacques Mairesse, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Economique (ENSAE), Paris, France. The National Bureau of Economic Research, under the direction of Dr. Griliches, has been conducting a major study in this area for the last several years with support from NSF. Joint research to date between Dr. Griliches and Dr. Mairesse has concentrated on two major topics: comparative studies of productivity growth and econometric issues in the analysis of panel data. They will now expand into a third area: the measurement of output and prices at the firm and industry level as a prerequisite for the correct understanding of movements in productivity. In the first area they have been studying the impact of R&D expenditures on productivity growth of firms in the U.S., France, and Japan, and also comparing the patterns of growth of firms in both France and the U.S. This has resulted in a major study comparing productivity growth and returns to R&D in Japanese and U.S. manufacturing and two parallel studies of individual firm growth in the U.S. and France respectively. The present award will allow the investigators to expand and update their Japanese manufacturing study using newer and more extensive data. They also plan to extend the earlier U.S.-Japan comparison to include a direct comparison to similar results for French firms. Additional topics of study will be 1) measurement of output and prices 2) analysis of patent data using European data on their renewal rates to infer both the rates of obsolescence in the private value of patented knowledge, and the magnitude and distribution of such values. Both Dr. Griliches and Dr. Mairesse are highly regarded experts in this area of economics research.
