The paper, "Competition and Innovation: An Inverted-U Relationship," two of whose authors recently won the Nobel prize in economics, claims to "find strong evidence of an inverted U relationship" between "product market competition and innovation." We reanalyze their data using alternative statistical models and graphics that are more appropriate to answering their research question, and we also discuss concerns with their data. Our reanalysis supports the authors' narrow statistical claim but we question its larger implications, given how weak their measure of innovation is, as a predictor of their measure of product market competition.
