We examine the impact of Chinese import competition on broad measures of technical change—patenting, IT, and TFP—using new panel data across twelve European countries from 1996 to 2007. In particular, we establish that the absolute volume of innovation increases within the firms most affected by Chinese imports in their output markets. We correct for endogeneity using the removal of product-specific quotas following China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. Chinese import competition led to increased technical change within firms and reallocated employment between firms towards more technologically advanced firms. These within and between effects were about equal in magnitude, and account for 14% of European technology upgrading over 2000–7 (and even more when we allow for offshoring to China). Rising Chinese import competition also led to falls in employment and the share of unskilled workers. In contrast to low-wage nations like China, developed countries had no significant effect on innovation.

This paper examines the empirical relationship between technological innovations, market share and stock market value. New developments in the estimation of dynamic count data models are used to control for unobserved firm specific heterogeneity. We find a robust and positive effect of market share on observable headcounts of innovations and patents although increased product market competition in the industry tends to stimulate innovative activity. Furthermore, the impact of innovation on market value is larger for firms with higher market shares. We argue that our results are consistent with models where high market share firms have incentives to pre-emptively innovate.

This paper shows that, with (partial) irreversibility, higher uncertainty reduces the impact effect of demand shocks on investment.Uncertainty increases real option values making firms more cautious when investing or disinvesting.This is confirmed both numerically for a model with a rich mix of adjustment costs, time-varying uncertainty, and aggregation over investment decisions and time, and also empirically for a panel of manufacturing firms.These cautionary effects of uncertainty are large -going from the lower quartile to the upper quartile of the uncertainty distribution typically halves the first year investment response to demand shocks.This implies the responsiveness of firms to any given policy stimulus may be much lower in periods of high uncertainty, such as after major shocks like OPEC I and 9/11.