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Growth is Getting Harder to Find, Not Ideas
Teresa C. Fort,
Nathan Goldschlag,
Jack Liang,
Peter K. Schott
& Nikolas Zolas
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Working Paper 35182
DOI 10.3386/w35182
Issue Date May 2026
Relatively flat US productivity growth versus rising R&D expenditures is often interpreted as evidence that ideas are getting harder to find. We build a new 45-year panel tracking the universe of US firms' patenting to investigate the micro underpinnings of this conclusion, separately examining the relationships between research inputs and ideas (patents) versus ideas and growth. We find that average patents per R&D input are increasing, the elasticity of patents to R&D inputs is flat or rising, and there is not systematic evidence of a secular decline in patenting after controlling for research inputs. We then document a positive, significant, and fairly steady relationship between firms' patent and labor productivity growth rates. Average firm growth after controlling for patent growth, however, declines. Together, these results suggest that firms' innovative efforts play a key role in sustaining growth that has not diminished over the last four decades.
Acknowledgements and Disclosures
We thank Nick Bloom, Santiago Caicedo, Cheryl Grim, Chad Jones, Samuel Kortum, Ezra Oberfield, Bitsy Perlman, Michael Peters, Thomas Sampson, Chad Syverson, Karthik Tadepalli, Fabrizio Zilibotti and numerous conference and seminar participants for helpful comments and suggestions. Any opinions and conclusions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the US Census Bureau. The Census Bureau has ensured appropriate access and use of confidential data and has reviewed these results for disclosure avoidance protection (Project 7083300: CBDRB-FY25-CES002-001 and CBDRBFY25-CED006-012). Parts of the paper were written while Fort, Goldschlag, and Zolas were US Census Bureau employees. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Teresa C. Fort
This paper was presented at the IMF Annual Research Conference in November 2012. Papers from that conference are considered for publication in the IMF Economic Review and this paper is under consideration at that journal. Upon acceptance and publication in that journal, authors share an honorarium for participating in the Annual Research Conference and publishing the paper in the IMF Economic Review.
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Teresa C. Fort, Nathan Goldschlag, Jack Liang, Peter K. Schott, and Nikolas Zolas, "Growth is Getting Harder to Find, Not Ideas," NBER Working Paper 35182 (2026), https://doi.org/10.3386/w35182.
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Topics
Macroeconomics
Development and Growth
Growth and Productivity
Programs
Economic Fluctuations and Growth
International Trade and Investment
Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship
Working Groups
Entrepreneurship
Innovation Policy
Conferences
Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship, Spring 2026
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