On the Timing and Efficiency of Creative Destruction

2003

A Schumpeterian growth model is constructed for an economy with wage bargaining. It is shown that the economy is subject to cycles in which capital, output and employment vary in fixed proportion. These increase through saving and capital accumulation until a new technology is introduced, at which moment they fall sharply due to obsolescence of capital. When the labour market is deregulated to weaken workers' position in bargaining, the labour-capital ratio increases but the average growth rate of the economy decreases. The growth cycle can be socially optimal. An elasticity rule is given for when the labour market should be regulated and when deregulated.

Journal of Economics Zeitschrift f�r National�konomie, 1999

Newly established firms often try to secure their market position by building up a base of loyal customers. While recessions may not destroy technological leadership, they may be harmful for such firm-customer relationships. Without such customer bases, these firms find themselves more vulnerable to attacks by competitors. We formulate this idea within an Aghion-Howitt-type model of creative destruction and discuss its implications for growth. In the context of this model, recessions might be good for growth since they weaken the incumbent firm's position and, thereby, stimulate research by outside firms. The model allows for the extreme case where the leading firm can be so entrenched that growth ceases, unless a recession shakes up its customer base. We find a one-to-one relationship between the average growth rate and the cyclical variability, a U-shaped relationship between the average speed of building up good customer relationships and the average growth rate, and a positive relationship between the arrival rate of recessions and average growth. It is finally shown that an appropriate stochastic tax program can implement the social planner's solution. In some cases, general-equilibrium effects may generate interesting results, conflicting with intuition from a partial-equilibrium approach: we show that, in some cases, a social planner might want to subsidize research in order to discourage it.

Journal of Productivity Analysis, 2012

This paper examines the within-industry distributions of jobs created and destructed across plants in terms of technical efficiency, technical efficiency change, scale effect, and technical change. It further investigates how these distributions vary with economic activity. By applying the stochastic frontier analysis to plant-level longitudinal data on Taiwan's 23 two-digit manufacturing industries spanning the period 1992-2003, we find that jobs created (destructed) are disproportionately clustered at plants with lower technical efficiency but higher rate of technical change. A fall in economic activities is associated with a statistically significant decrease (increase) in the fraction of newly created (destructed) jobs accounted for by plants with a higher rate of technical change, indicating that creative destruction is more pronounced during economic contractions.

Review of Economic Dynamics, 1998

We generalize apparently contradictory results in the literature about the effect of exogenous technological progress on unemployment. We assume that new technology can be adopted either through creative job destruction or through onthe-job implementation at a cost. We show that there is a critical level of implementation cost where the effect of growth on employment switches from positive to negative at higher costs. In extensions of the model we show that gross job reallocation can increase at faster growth with no clear-cut effects on aggregate employment.

Review of Economic Dynamics, 1998

We generalize apparently contradictory results in the literature about the effect of exogenous technological progress on unemployment. We assume that new technology can be adopted either through creative job destruction or through onthe-job implementation at a cost. We show that there is a critical level of implementation cost where the effect of growth on employment switches from positive to negative at higher costs. In extensions of the model we show that gross job reallocation can increase at faster growth with no clear-cut effects on aggregate employment.

1995

In a dynamic general equilibrium setup, this paper aims at providing a general framework for the analysis of the role of vintages and creative destruetion on business fiuctuations. By stressing the forward-Iooking behavior of the optimal scrapping rule, we use a standard rational expectations argument to show) in the linear utility case, the time independence of the scrapping function. Secondly, we prove that equilibrium output shows a purely periodic behavior around an exponential growth trend, the pattern of the cycle being deterrnined by the pattern of initial conditions. The vintage capital model presented in this paper provides a new view on business fiuctuations: historical conditions are at the basis of business fiuctuations, in the sense that historically volatile or stable econornies will reproduce their own historical pattern in the future.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

The 2008 economic crisis has severely reduced the short-term willingness of firms to invest in innovation. But this reduction has not occurred uniformly and a few firms have even increased their investment in spite of the adverse macroeconomic environment. On the ground of a fresh European Survey carried out by Innobarometer, this paper compares drivers of innovation investment before, during and following on from the crisis. Using the two Schumpeterian models of technological accumulation and creative destruction the paper shows that before the crisis incumbent firms were more likely to expand their innovation investment, but that the crisis has reverted this picture, giving space to a restricted number of small firms and new entrants that swim against the stream and are expanding innovative activities.

Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 2006

This paper looks at the linkages between growth and business cycles by bringing together two strands of literature. We incorporate a quality ladders engine of growth into an otherwise standard real business cycle model. Our fundamental question is, can Schumpeter's creative destruction process which leads to lumpy technological improvement over time also generate realistic business cycles? We use a standard real business cycle approach to solve for rules of motion in our state variables and proceed to generate artificial time series. We compare the statistical properties of these series with their historical counterparts to determine if the model mimics the real world closely. One advantage our approach has over the standard approach is that the trend component is included in our artificial series just as it is in the data. Hence, we are not tied to any particular filtering method when we compare simulations with the real world data. We find that Schumpeterian fluctuations alone cannot generate realistic business cycles. We also find, however, that a model with both Schumpeterian and standard RBC shocks performs better in many dimensions than a model relying on standard RBC shocks alone.

2000

There is increasing empirical evidence that creative destruction, driven by experimentation and the adoption of new products and processes when investment is sunk, is a core mechanism of development. Obstacles to this process are likely to be obstacles to the progress in standards of living. Generically, underdeveloped and politicized institutions are a major impediment to a well-fimctioning creative destruction process, and result in sluggish creation, technological "sclerosis," and spurious reallocation. Those ills reflect the macroeconomic consequences of contracting failures in the presence of sunk investments. Recurrent crises are another major obstacle to creative destruction. The common inference that increased liquidations during crises result in increased restructuring is unwarranted. Indications are, to the contrary, that crises freeze the restructuring process and that this is associated with the tight financial-market conditions that follow. This productivity cost of recessions adds to the traditional costs of resource under-utilization.