Product Variety, Innovation and Growth

This thesis aims to provide new insights on the different mechanisms that facilitate innovation and their relative importance in driving growth. Innovation is an important engine for economic growth and considerable effort has been devoted in understanding how technical change drives aggregate growth. Most literature in the field has focused on counting patents or survey based work of particular industries, for short samples. In this thesis, we open new avenues for research in firm innovation creating firm level measures that are available for long time series and across all industries (manufacturing and service). We propose three different measures that allow for the identification and classification of firm products, process and product innovations, and clean technologies at the firm level for public and private firms. Furthermore, we propose methods of aggregating these measures at the industry and economy level. We use the newly proposed measures in applications ranging from firm value in corporate finance to aggregate economic impact in macroeconomics. The new proposed measures allow for differentiation across innovation mechanisms that are paramount for setting innovation policy \citep{klenow2019, Hall2011, Atkeson2019}.

Grantor dc:publisher

UNSW, Sydney

Year dc:date

2021

Author dc:creator

• Liu, Leo

Statement dc:rights

• open access
• CC BY 4.0
• free_to_read

Licence

• https://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2
• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Identifier

https://doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/23907

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:unsworks.library.unsw.edu.au:1959.4/100217