IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/21817.html

Ideas and Firm Dynamics When It Takes Two to Tango

Author

Listed:
  • Kim, Seula
  • Olmstead-Rumsey, Jane
  • Wang, Honghao

Abstract

Teams of inventors now produce over 80% of U.S. patents, up from just 45% in 1976. Over the same period, inventor employment has become increasingly concentrated in large firms, rising six times more than overall employment concentration. To explain these trends, we develop a new model of endogenous team formation within firms and embed it in a general equilibrium model of the inventor labor market. Teams increase firms' returns to scale by increasing the likelihood of productive matches between inventors. The value of these matches rise over time, possibly driven by increasing knowledge specialization. This causes large firms to expand and small firms to shrink in equilibrium, accounting for the observed increase in inventor employment concentration. Because firms do not internalize knowledge spillovers, there is misallocation of inventors across firms. The rise of team production amplifies this misallocation by a factor of six by reallocating inventors away from small firms that generate disproportionately large knowledge spillovers.

Suggested Citation

  • Kim, Seula & Olmstead-Rumsey, Jane & Wang, Honghao, 2026. "Ideas and Firm Dynamics When It Takes Two to Tango," CEPR Discussion Papers 21817, Centre for Economic Policy Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:21817
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP21817
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • O30 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - General
    • E20 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - General (includes Measurement and Data)
    • O40 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:21817. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CEPR (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://cepr.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.