NBER Working Papers by Jordi Jaumandreu

This paper develops a simple framework to estimate the parameters of the production function together with the elasticity of the demand for the output and the impact of demand and cost shifters. The use of this framework helps, in the first place, to treat successfully the difficult problem of the endogeneity of input quantities. But it also provides a natural way to assess the welfare effects of firms’ innovative actions by estimating their impact on both cost and demand. We show that the total current period (static) welfare gains of introducing a process or a product innovation are, on average, about 1.6% and 4%, respectively, of the value of the firm's current sales. The increase in consumer surplus amounts to two- thirds of these gains in the first case and half in the second.

This paper studies the impact of process and product innovations introduced by firms on employment growth in these firms. A simple model that relates employment growth to process innovations and to the growth of sales separately due to innovative and unchanged products is developed and estimated using comparable firm-level data from France, Germany, Spain and the UK. Results show that displacement effects induced by productivity growth in the production of old products are large, while those associated with process innovations, which are likely to be compensated by price decreases, appear to be small. The effects related to product innovations are, however, strong enough to overcompensate these displacement effects.