IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/opn/wpaper/63.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Firm Growth Dynamics Under Different Knowledge Regimes: the case of the pharmaceutical industry

Author

Listed:
  • Mariana Mazzucato

    (Department of Economics, Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University)

  • Pelin Demirel

Abstract

The paper studies the dynamics of firm growth and firm size distributions in the pharmaceutical industry from 1950 to 2003 and in the biotechnology industry from the early 1980's to 2003. Growth dynamics are studied in the context of how the size composition of firms changes, how innovation patterns (patents) change, as well as locational decisions of firms (NJ vs. California). Results suggest that Gibrat's law (random growth) does not hold for the majority of the period under observation, and that the growth advantage of small pharma firms increases after the 1980's as the process of innovation becomes more 'guided' and scale intensive and as small firm innovation becomes more 'persistent'. Furthermore, at the end of the 1970's a 'bimodal' firm size distribution emerges in the pharmaceutical industry precisely when a new division of labor between large and small firms sets in. We find that firms located in California are smaller, faster growing and more innovative than those in NJ.

Suggested Citation

  • Mariana Mazzucato & Pelin Demirel, 2007. "Firm Growth Dynamics Under Different Knowledge Regimes: the case of the pharmaceutical industry," Open Discussion Papers in Economics 63, The Open University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:opn:wpaper:63
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    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:opn:wpaper:63. 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: IT team member (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deopeuk.html .

    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.