Research in research and development economics.

Summary The purpose of this paper is to present some microeconomics and microeconometrics work related to the economics of research and development as well as some theoretical econometrics work. I examine how research strategies can influence the formation of market structures, and the respective roles of policy instruments such as patents and cooperation agreements in correcting the effects of research externalities. In terms of microeconomics, I try to assess some of the key characteristics of innovation. Thus, I try to measure how research activity allows to shift the frontiers of production possibilities. I also seek to understand the characteristics of the production of technological innovations by estimating a research production function. A final empirical study is devoted to the analysis of the relationship between market structures and innovative activity in which I use different measures of innovative activity: research expenditures, the number of patents filed and different information on the output of the innovation process available through recent innovation surveys. The work of theoretical econometrics is devoted on the one hand to the question of the elimination of nuisance parameters in cases of inference based on the method of generalized moments. On the other hand, I am interested in the selectivity bias in panels. Considering the case of an autoregressive model, I propose an estimation method which under general assumptions allows to estimate without specifying the law of the disappearance of the observations.