Productivity of and Returns to Knowledge Investments

Information and knowledge are essential to the decision making of firms. However, information is a primitive in the formation of knowledge. Information and the related concepts of risk and surprise are primarily of importance for rational decision making while knowledge is a form of (non-material) capital to be used as a resource in the transformation of different inputs into valuable outputs. Knowledge can be embodied in educated labor, in material capital, as patented production recipes or as contents of publically available documents and other media. In the paper optimality aspects of the acquisition of knowledge capital is analyzed. Estimates of private and public returns to investments in knowledge are reported. Some economic consequences of frictions over time and space are analyzed and new models containing such frictions are proposed.