Why has productivity dispersion across firms gone up?

Yesterday Alex outlined the facts, which I take to be not in dispute.  Firms at the frontier have seen significant productivity gains, the others not so much.  Alex calls this a “lack of innovation diffusion” and considers whether IP law might be one cause.

My framing is somewhat different.  The result reminds me of the international trade literature on why so few firms export.  The notions of increasing returns to scale, and fixed costs to trade abroad, provide the beginnings of an answer.  In such a setting, let’s say the world has become more globalized, more IRS, and more based on learning curves, much of those trends being attributable to information technology.  In that case we would expect a growing bifurcation of firm productivity outcomes, just as we find a strong bifurcation of export outcomes, with a relatively small percentage of firms doing most of the international trade, or innovating, as the case may be.  The “only a small percentage of firms export” and the “only a small percentage of firms are on the productivity frontier” may sometimes even be the same way of describing the same basic fact.

The on the ground reality I observe is that the large, famous, exporting firms put together fantastic O-Ring teams of talent in a way the smaller, medium-size enterprises do not.  That is the relevant diffusion barrier, but of course there may be limits on that diffusion as well.  Eliminating barriers across firms is a good idea but not enough either.

And does the presence of relatively strict IP law subsidize such O-Ring teams, or limit their diffusion?  You can argue it either way.

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