How do political connections affect firm dynamics, innovation, and creative destruction? We extend a Schumpeterian growth model with political connections that help firms ease bureaucratic and regulatory burden. The model highlights how political connections influence an economy's business dynamism and innovation, and generates a number of implications guiding our empirical analysis. We construct a new large‐scale data set for the period 1993–2014, on the universe of firms, workers, and politicians, complemented with corporate financial statements, patent data, and election data, so as to define connected firms as those employing local politicians. We identify a leadership paradox: market leaders are much more likely to be politically connected, but much less likely to innovate. Political connections relate to a higher rate of survival, as well as growth in employment and revenues, but not in productivity—a result that we also confirm using the regression discontinuity design. At the aggregate level, gains from political connections do not offset losses stemming from lower reallocation and growth.

We attempt to understand potential common forces behind rising market concentration and a slowdown in business dynamism in the US economy, through a micro-founded general equilibrium model of endogenous firm dynamics. The model captures the strategic behavior between competing firms, its effect on their innovation decisions, and the resulting “best-versus-the-rest” dynamics. We consider multiple potential mechanisms that can drive the observed changes and use the calibrated model to assess their relative importance, with particular attention to the implied transitional dynamics. Our results highlight the dominant role of a decline in the intensity of knowledge diffusion from frontier firms to laggard ones. We present new evidence that corroborates a declining knowledge diffusion in the economy.