CDM 20 Years After

In year 1998, the seminal study Research Innovation and Productivity: An Econometric Analysis at the Firm Level, commonly labeled CDM (the acronym of the three authors’ names, Crépon, Duguet and Mairesse), was published in this journal. The empirical framework, presented there, following on ideas in the research of Zvi Griliches at the NBER and is one of the most influential contributions in recent literature on economics of innovation. The original CDM paper and papers inspired by its framework have received hundreds of citations in the empirical innovation literature. Whether directly linked or not to the CDM framework, the flow of studies improving on and enlarging the scope and methods of the empirical literature on R&D, innovation and productivity is continuing. Some of them, for example, focus on financing innovation, or innovation and employment, or innovation and trade, or competition, or intellectual property; some adopt a managerial perspective, or an innovation system approach in a Schumpeterian tradition, etc. This introduction to the special issue of EINT surveys a collection of 12 papers on the CDM model by 25 authors from eight countries. The papers take stock of the evolution of research based on the original CDM model launched 20 years ago, linking it to the previous literature, and proposing developments and generalizations of it in various dimensions.