Agustí Segarra

New Firms' Survival and Market Turbulence: New Evidence from Spain*

The availability of longitudinal data for individual firms has allowed the improvementof the existing knowledge on market structure dynamics. We present additional evidence through the analysis of a cohort of Spanish manufacturing firms. Our results confirm some basic empirical findings obtained in studies for other countries. According to the behavior of the cohort we study, Gibrats Law does not hold for new entrants. Patterns of market turbulence vary considerably according to the type of industry. The behavior of new firms seems to fit the learning model. The estimation of a hazard function demonstrates that the main regularities affecting the likelihood of survival of young firms are quite similar in different types of countries.

Business Dynamics and Efficiency in Industries and Regions: The Case of Spain

High rates of firm births and deaths are a pervasive phenomenon across industries and territories. Most studies have related the great turbulence at the fringe of practically all manufacturing industries to positive effects on the long-run performance of industries. According to these views business turbulence, although it has a relatively small incidence on net entry, leads to allocative improvement and stimulates innovation. The existing set of empirical studies does not reach clear conclusions, however, and many questions are still open. Our contribution analyses the relationship between business dynamics in manufacturing and the growth of total factor productivity in industries and regions. After a review of current literature on entry and exit it is argued that most models are tailored to suit the processes observed in industries and regions that are near the technological frontier, and we propose an approach that could be more representative of middle range economies such as Spain. According to this approach new firms are seen more as users of innovations than producers of innovations. We adopt a model based on a vintage capital framework in which new entrants embody the edge technologies available and exiting businesses are supposed to represent the most marginal obsolete plants. Both industries and regions are represented by a Halls type production function which controls for imperfect competition and economies of scale. The results show that both entry and exit rates contribute positively to the growth of total factor productivity in industries and in regions.

Productivity and R&D sources: evidence for Catalan firms

This paper draws on a sample of innovative Catalan firms to identify how two main sources of innovation – internal R&D and external R&D acquisition – affect productivity in the manufacturing and service industries. The sample comprises 1612 innovative firms from the fourth European Community Innovation Survey (CIS-4) during the period 2002–2004. We compare empirical results when applying the usual OLS and quantile regression techniques controlling with a non-parametric sample selection. Our results indicate the different patterns that are attributable to the two sources of innovation as we move up from lower to higher conditional quantiles. First, the marginal effect of internal R&D on productivity decreased as we moved up to higher productivity levels. Second, the marginal effect of external R&D acquisition increased as we moved up to higher productivity levels. Finally, empirical results show significant complementarities between internal and external R&D, which are higher for knowledge-intensive service sectors.