the micro origins of business cycles evidence from german metropolitan areas how large is volatility due to large firms we answer this question through both reduced form analysis and a calibration exercise first we exploit time and spatial variation across german cities

the structure of licensing contracts industrial organization theory has explored several issues related to licensing but empirical analyses are extremely rare we amass a new and detailed dataset on licensing contracts and use it to present some simple facts concerning licensing behavior our analysis reveals robust cross industries differences in several contractual features such as exclusivity cross licensing ex ante versus ex post technology transfers and licensing to related versus unrelated parties we offer an interpretation of these facts based on cross industry variation in the strength of intellectual property rights

technological regimes and schumpeterian patterns of innovation this paper proposes that the specific pattern of innovative activities in an industry can be explained as the outcome of different technological learning regimes a technological regime is defined by the particular combination of technological opportunities appropriability of innovations cumulativeness of technical advances and properties of the knowledge base building upon the distinction between schumpeter mark i and schumpeter mark ii industries this paper provides empirical estimates of the relationships between indicators of the schumpeterian patterns of innovation concentration of innovative activities stability in the hierarchy of innovators and importance of new innovators and indicators of the variables defining technological regimes

risk sharing in licensing abstract this paper studies the design of linear license contracts under demand or cost uncertainty the optimal contract consists in general of a mix of a fixed fee and royalties the source of uncertainty has a crucial impact on the type of royalties that must be used in particular under demand uncertainty at most two of the instruments are used the contract generally combines a fixed fee with an ad valorem royalty when cost is uncertain a wider variety of cases can arise the contract may involve a combination of either type of royalties coupled with a fixed fee alternatively it may be optimal to use all three available instruments

large firm dynamics and the business cycle do large firm dynamics drive the business cycle we answer this question by developing a quantitative theory of aggregate fluctuations caused by firm level disturbances alone we show that a standard heterogeneous firm dynamics setup already contains in it a theory of the business cycle without appealing to aggregate shocks we offer an analytical characterization of the law of motion of the aggregate state in this class of models the firm size distribution and show that aggregate output and productivity dynamics display i persistence ii volatility and iii time varying second moments we explore the key role of moments of the firm size distribution and in particular the role of large firm dynamics in shaping aggregate fluctuations theoretically quantitatively and in the data

the relationship between firm growth size and age estimates for 100 manufacturing industries this study uses a sample of all firms operating in 100 manufacturing industries to examine some aspects of firm dynamics it finds that firm growth the variability of firm growth and the probability that a firm will fail decrease with firm age it also finds that firm growth decreases at a diminishing rate with firm size even after controlling for the exit of slow growing firms from the sample gibrat s law therefore fails although the severity of the failure decreases with firm size copyright 1987 by blackwell publishing ltd

sectoral patterns of technical change towards a taxonomy and a theory abstract the purpose of the paper is to describe and explain sectoral patterns of technical change as revealed by data on about 2000 significant innovations in britain since 1945 most technological knowledge turns out not to be information that is generally applicable and easily reproducible but specific to firms and applications cumulative in development and varied amongst sectors in source and direction innovating firms principally in electronics and chemicals are relatively big and they develop innovations over a wide range of specific product groups within their principal sector but relatively few outside firms principally in mechanical and instrument engineering are relatively small and specialised and they exist in symbiosis with large firms in scale intensive sectors like metal manufacture and vehicles who make a significant contribution to their own process technology in textile firms on the other hand most process innovations come from suppliers these characteristics and variations can be classified in a three part taxonomy based on firms 1 supplier dominated 2 production intensive 3 science based they can be explained by sources of technology requirements of users and possibilities for appropriation this explanation has implications for our understanding of the sources and directions of technical change firms diversification behaviour the dynamic relationship between technology and industrial structure and the formation of technological skills and advantages at the level of the firm the region and the country

r d appropriability opportunity and market structure new evidence on some schumpeterian hypotheses one of the largest bodies of literature in the field of industrial organization is devoted to the interpretation and testing of several hypotheses advanced by joseph schumpeter 1950 concerning innovation and industrial market structure one set of hypotheses focuses on the role of firm size as a determinant of r d spending and the rate of technological advance another set focuses on the effect of market concentration on r d and technological advance in this paper we reexamine the latter set of hypotheses at the industry level using new data on r d appropriability and technological opportunity collected by levin et al 1984 in a survey of r d executives in 130 industries

gibrat s law and quantile regressions an application to firm growth abstract the nexus between firm growth size and age in u s manufacturing is examined through the lens of quantile regression models this methodology allows us to overcome serious shortcomings entailed by linear regression models employed by much of the existing literature unveiling a number of important properties size pushes both low and high performing firms towards the median rate of growth while age is never advantageous and more so as firms are relatively small and grow faster these findings support theoretical generalizations of gibrat s law that allow size to affect the variance of the growth process but not its mean cordoba 2008

technology transfer under asymmetric information licensing contracts for newly patented innovations are observed to vary along several dimensions including the form and size of the payment to the inventor fixedfee versus some output based royalty the degree of exclusivity and the division of rents in this article we show that theform of the contract can be explained by two problems in technology exchange the superiority of a licensor s precontractual information about the economic value of the innovation and thefact that sharing this information with the licensee mayfacilitate imitation we show that a licensor signals her technology type with an output based payment or royalty and may leave some of the rents with the licensee conditions under which exclusive license contracts linear and nonlinear and nonexclusive linear contracts are used to transfer technology are identified

explaining the distribution of firm growth rates empirical analyses on aggregated datasets have revealed a common exponential behavior in the shape of the probability density of corporate growth rates we present clear cut evidence on this topic using disaggregated data we explain the observed regularities proposing a model in which firms ability to take up new business opportunities increases with the number of opportunities already exploited a theoretical result is presented for the limiting case in which the number of firms and opportunities go to infinity moreover using simulations we show that even in a small industry the agreement with asymptotic results is almost complete

comparative analysis of firm demographics and survival evidence from micro level sources in oecd countries in this paper we present cross country evidence on firm size distribution firm demographic and post entry performance for 10 oecd countries we use harmonized firm level data drawn from business registers or social security records these data enable international comparisons and the identification of idiosyncratic country effects while average firm size differs across countries due to both sectoral specialization and within sector characteristics we find similar degrees of firm churning across countries in most of them about 20 of firms enter and exit most markets every year and about 20 40 of entering firms fail within the first 2 years of life however post entry growth of successful entrants is much higher in the usa than in europe which may be indicative of barriers to firm growth as opposed to barriers to entry

fee versus royalty licensing in a cournot duopoly model abstract this paper finds that royalty licensing can be superior to fixed fee licensing for the patent holding firm when the cost reducing innovation is non drastic the reason for this result is that the patent holding firm enjoys a cost advantage over the licensee under royalty licensing while the two firms compete on equal footing under fixed fee licensing

contracting with externalities the paper studies inefficiencies arising in contracting between one principal and n agents when the utility of each agent depends on all agents trades with the principal when the principal commits to a set of publicly observable bilateral contract offers the arising inefficiency is due entirely to the externalities imposed on non signers in contrast when the principal s offers are privately observed the distortion is due to the externalities given agents equilibrium trades comparison of the two externalities determines the relative efficiency of the two contracting regimes in both cases we show that when n is large each agent can be treated as non pivotal provided that appropriate continuity assumptions are satisfied we also study the case in which the principal can condition each agent s trade on other agents messages we characterize the set of such mechanisms in which each agent s participation is voluntary when the principal can commit to any such mechanism she implements the first best outcome while threatening each deviator with the harshest possible punishment however in the presence of noise that goes to zero slower than n goes to infinity in the limit we obtain a generally inefficient outcome in which each agent feels non pivotal

the magnitude of innovation by demand in a sectoral system the role of industrial users in semiconductors abstract how relevant is innovation by demand compared to innovation by other actors in a sector in quantitative terms this is a yet unanswered question the current study fills this major gap in the literature on industry studies by taking a sectoral system perspective this study is able to highlight the magnitude of innovation by intermediate user firms in a high technology sector semiconductors using a combination of different datasets patents co patents r d alliances and new ventures in semiconductors this study proposes a novel quantitative approach to assessing the magnitude of innovative activity by user firms the study reaches several findings first the magnitude of innovation by user firms as measured by patents is high in both absolute and relative terms compared to semiconductor firms and other actors in the sector second the distribution of patents among different demand segments is highly uneven third innovative user firms are highly heterogeneous in terms of size diversification and vertical integration fourth collaboration in r d and co patenting activity in semiconductors take place not just between user firms and semiconductor firms but also among user firms themselves fifth innovative user firms are quite active in entrepreneurial activity in semiconductors and their new ventures on average survive longer than spin offs or other start ups

zipf s law for cities an explanation zipf s law is a very tight constraint on the class of admissible models of local growth it says that for most countries the size distribution of cities strikingly fits a power law the number of cities with populations greater than s is proportional to 1 s suppose that at least in the upper tail all cities follow some proportional growth process this appears to be verified empirically this automatically leads their distribution to converge to zipf s law

abuse of dominance and licensing of intellectual property patent thickets layers of licenses a firm needs to be able to offer products that embody technologies owned by multiple firms and licensing policies have drawn increasing scrutiny from policy makers patent thickets involve complementary products which gives rise to double marginalization the so called royalty stacking problem and has the potential to retard diffusion of new technologies and reduce consumer welfare this paper examines the impact of licensing policies of one or more upstream owners essential intellectual property ip on the downstream firms that require access to that ip the terms under which downstream firms can access this ip affects entry decisions product diversity prices and welfare we consider both the case in which a single party controls the essential ip and the case in which different parties control complementary pieces of essential ip we compare the outcome of several alternative standard licensing arrangements such as flat rate access fees royalty percentages per unit fees patent pools and cross licensing arrangements with or without vertical integration we first consider the case where there is a single upstream owner of essential ip increasing the number of licenses enhances product variety which creates added value but it also intensifies downstream competition which dissipates profits we derive conditions under which the upstream ip monopoly will then want to provide an excessive or insufficient number of licenses relative to the number that maximizes consumer surplus or social welfare when there are multiple owners of essential ip royalty stacking can reduce the number of the downstream licensees but also the downstream equilibrium prices the consumers face the paper derives conditions determining whether this reduction in downstream price and variety is beneficial to consumers or society finally the paper explores the impact of alternative licensing policies with fixed license fees or royalties expressed as a percentage of the price an upstream ip owner cannot control the intensity of downstream competition in contrast volume based license fees i e per unit access fees do permit an upstream owner to control downstream competition and to replicate the outcome of complete integration the paper also shows that vertical integration can have little impact on downstream competition and licensing terms when ip owners charge fixed or volume based access fees

fees versus royalties and the private value of a patent we compare how much profit an owner of a patented cost reducing invention can realize by licensing it to an oligopolistic industry producing a homogeneous product by means of a fixed fee or a per unit royalty our analysis is conducted in terms of a noncooperative game involving n 1 players the inventor and the n firms in this game the inventor acts as a stackelberg leader and it has a unique subgame perfect equilibrium in pure strategies it is shown that licensing by means of a fixed fee is superior to licensing by means of a royalty for both the inventor and consumers only a drastic innovation is licensed to a single producer

new evidence on gibrat s law for cities the aim of this work is to test empirically the validity of gibrat s law in the growth of cities using data on the complete distribution of cities without size restrictions or a truncation point in three countries the us spain and italy for the entire 20th century for this we use different techniques first panel data unit root tests tend to confirm the validity of gibrat s law in the upper tail distribution and second we find mixed evidence in favour of gibrat s law in the long term in general size affects the variance of the growth process but not its mean when using nonparametric methods that relate the growth rate to city size moreover the lognormal distribution works as a good description of city size distribution across the whole century when no truncation point is considered

small firm entry in us manufacturing a cross section empirical analysis examining the entry behavior of small firms is provided in this paper while the authors find that certain traditional market structure characteristics and entry barriers have a strong impact on small firm entry behavior the reliance upon innovative strategy by small firms also explains a significant amount of the variation in the pattern of entry by small firms they conclude that small firm entry is at least partially determined by entry barriers industry specific characteristics facilitating retaliatory conduct by incumbent firms and the reliance upon innovative strategy by small firms copyright 1989 by the london school of economics and political science

on licensing policies in bertrand competition abstract three licensing policies the auction the fee and the royalty are studied in a bertrand type duopoly with differentiated goods the analysis is conducted in terms of a multistage noncooperative game involving an external patentee and two firms each producing a differentiated good in bertrand price competition a principal finding is that for a patentee the royalty may be superior to the other two policies journal of economic literature classification numbers 026 611 621

licensing a new product with non linear contracts this paper looks at a situation where a licensor owns a patent on a technology that allows the production of a new good the licensor seeks to license its innovation to a set of producers that differ according to their marginal cost of producing an existing good we show that the licensor is able to obtain the profit a monopolist would achieve by producing the new good the equilibrium licensing contract specifies both a fixed fee and a royalty scheme based on the production of a licensee le memoire examine la situation ou un detenteur de brevet sur une technologie qui permet de produire un nouveau bien cherche a ceder une autorisation d exploiter cette innovation a un ensemble de producteurs qui ont differents couts marginaux de production d un bien existant on montre que le detenteur de brevet est capable d obtenir le profit qu un monopoleur obtiendrait en produisant le nouveau bien le contrat de licence d equilibre specifie a la fois un paiement forfaitaire et un arrangement de royautes sur la base du volume de production de l exploitant

how to license intangible property we examine the optimal licensing strategy of a research lab selling to firms who are product market competitors we consider an independent lab as well as a research joint venture we show that 1 demands are interdependent and hence the standard price mechanism is not the profit maximizing licensing strategy 2 the seller s incentives to develop the innovation may be excessive 3 the seller s incentives to disseminate the innovation typically are too low 4 larger ventures are less likely to develop the innovation and more likely to restrict its dissemination in those cases where development occurs and 5 a downstream firm that is not a member of the research venture is worse off as a result of the innovation

technological regimes and sectoral patterns of innovative activities this paper focuses on the relationships between observed patterns of innovative activities within a sector and the related context and underlying microeconomic processes that might account for them it claims that there are some invariant features with respect to relative prices and incentives mechanisms of learning and knowledge accumulation that greatly affect the rate and structure of innovative activity these features are different across sectors the paper proposes that the specific pattern of innovative activity of a sector can be explained as the outcome of different technological regimes that are implied by the nature of technology and knowledge the notion of technological regime provides a synthetic representation of some of the most important economic properties of technologies and of the characteristics of the learning processes that are involved in innovative activities copyright 1997 by oxford university press

a generalized gibrat s law many economic and non economic variables such as income wealth firm size or city size often distribute pareto in the upper tail it is well established that gibrat s law can explain this phenomenon but gibrat s law often does not hold this note characterizes a class of processes one that includes gibrat s law as a special case that can explain pareto distributions of particular importance is a parsimonious generalization of gibrat s law that allows size to affect the variance of the growth process but not its mean this note also shows that under plausible conditions zipf s law is equivalent to gibrat s law