We introduce imperfect creditor protection in a multicountry Schumpeterian growth model. The theory predicts that any country with more than some critical level of financial development will converge to the growth rate of the world technology frontier, and that all other countries will have a strictly lower long-run growth rate. We present evidence supporting these and other implications, in the form of a cross-country growth regression with a significant and sizable negative coefficient on initial per-capita GDP (relative to the United States) interacted with financial intermediation. In addition, we find that other variables representing schooling, geography, health, policy, politics, and institutions do not affect the significance of the interaction between financial intermediation and initial per capita GDP, and do not show any independent effect on convergence in the regressions. Our findings are robust to removal of outliers and to alternative conditioning sets, estimation procedures, and measures of financial development.

By operationalizing the notion of creative destruction, Schumpeterian growth theory generates distinctive predictions on important microeconomic aspects of the growth process (competition, firm dynamics, firm size distribution, cross-firm and cross-sector reallocation) which can be confronted using rich micro data. In this process the theory helps reconcile growth with industrial organization and development economics.

This paper is part of a research program analyzing how competition affects aggregate innovative activity through its effects on firms’ organization. In previous work (Aghion et al., 2005a), we found an inverted-U shaped relationship between competition and innovation. Our explanation emphasized the “composition effect” of competition on the steady-state distribution of technological gaps across industries. Our focus here is on firms’ decisions whether or not to integrate vertically with their suppliers. We provide evidence of a U-shaped relationship between competition and vertical integration. Our explanation is based on the following idea: a moderate increase in product market competition will reduce a producer’s incentive to integrate by improving the outside options of her nonintegrated suppliers and hence raising their incentive to innovate. Too much competition will raise the producer’s incentive to integrate, however, by allowing nonintegrated suppliers to capture most of the innovation surplus. Finding a U-shaped relationship between competition and vertical integration sheds light on the debate over the “Transaction Cost Economics” (TCE) approach to vertical integration pioneered by Oliver Williamson (1975, 1985) versus the “Property Right Theory” (PRT) approach developed by Sanford Grossman and Oliver Hart (1986) and by Hart and John Moore (1990). According to the TCE approach, vertical integration is a way for contracting parties involved in a specific relationship to limit ex post bargaining inefficiencies due to holdup and thereby minimize the loss in ex ante investment that would result from it. This approach thus predicts a positive correlation between vertical integration and the degree of relation specificity. According to the PRT approach, the ownership structure will affect not so much the ex post bargaining efficiency as the relative bargaining powers of the (two) contracting parties, and therefore their relative ex ante investment incentives. Thus, while vertical integration should enhance both parties’ investments positively in the TCE approach by reducing the extent of ex post inefficiency, in the PRT approach ownership by one party, say the buyer, will enhance the buyer’s ex ante incentives at the expense of the seller’s, as it enhances the buyer’s bargaining power ex post at the expense of the seller’s. Thus, the TCE approach predicts that increased competition on the producer’s (or supplier’s) market, which reduces the overall degree of asset specificity, should therefore reduce the need for vertical integration in order to preserve ex ante investment incentives by either party. On the other hand, as we show below, the PRT approach allows the U-shaped relationship between vertical integration and competition that we find empirically. † Discussants: Sam Kortum, University of Minnesota; Mark Duggan, University of Maryland; Joel Waldfogel, University of Pennsylvania; Shane Greenstein, Northwestern University.

Is more intense product market competition and imitation good or bad for growth? This question is addressed in the context of an endogenous growth model with “step-by-step” innovations, in which technological laggards must first catch up with the leading-edge technology before battling for technological leadership in the future. In contrast to earlier Schumpeterian models in which innovations are always made by outsider firms who earn no rents if they fail to innovate and become monopolies if they do innovate, here we find: first, that the usual Schumpeterian effect of more intense product market competition (PMC) is almost always outweighed by the increased incentive for firms to innovate in order to escape competition, so that PMC has a positive effect on growth; second, that a little imitation is almost always growth-enhancing, as it promotes more frequent neck-and-neck competition, but too much imitation is unambiguously growth-reducing. The model thus points to complementary roles for competition (anti-trust) policy and patent policy.

How does firm entry affect innovation incentives in incumbent firms? Microdata suggest that there is heterogeneity across industries. Specifically, incumbent productivity growth and patenting is positively correlated with lagged greenfield foreign firm entry in technologically advanced industries, but not in laggard industries. In this paper we provide evidence that these correlations arise from a causal effect predicted by Schumpeterian growth theory—the threat of technologically advanced entry spurs innovation incentives in sectors close to the technology frontier, where successful innovation allows incumbents to survive the threat, but discourages innovation in laggard sectors, where the threat reduces incumbents' expected rents from innovating. We find that the empirical patterns hold using rich micro panel data for the United Kingdom. We control for the endogeneity of entry by exploiting major European and U.K. policy reforms, and allow for endogeneity of additional factors. We complement the analysis for foreign entry with evidence for domestic entry and entry through imports.