Prof. Amil Petrin, Ph.D.

The Effect of R&D on Quality, Productivity and Welfare

In this paper, Armil Petrin, joint with Mons Chan and Frederic Warzynski, provides a methodology that jointly studies production and demand for multi-product firms using detailed firm-product level data from Denmark. The results of the project document two intuitive effects of R&D on a firm’s profitability. More process innovation is shown to be associated with lower marginal costs and higher productivity, while product innovation leads to increase in product quality. Welfare is therefore increasing through these two distinct channels.

Mr. Petrin’s research areas are industrial organization, applied microeconomics and econometrics. His recent papers include: “Reducing Medicare Advantage Benchmarks Will Decrease Plan Generosity, But Those Effects Will Likely Be Modest,” “The Effect of R&D on Quality, Productivity, and Welfare,” “The Optimal Geographic Distribution of Managed Competition Subsidies,” and “A New Control Function Approach for Non-Parametric Regressions with Endogenous Variables.”

Amil Petrin is Professor of Economics at the University of Minnesota, having previously served as Associate Professor of Economics and Statistics at the University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business. He served on the Board of Directors of the Minnesota Economic Association and is currently an NBER Affiliated Scholar. He was Associate Editor of the International Journal of Industrial Organization and is currently Associate Editor of the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics. Mr. Petrin holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan and a BA in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.