This paper addresses normative exploitation of common renewable resources with changes in technology and technical, allocative, and scale efficiency that exacerbate the commons problem and externality. Their impact depends on the rate and nature of change, investment, and state of property...

The paper argues that a Cobb-Douglas specification may be a reasonable description of the Finnish aggregate production function when a sufficiently long time period (the 20th century) is considered. It is, however, a misleading description of the production technology for the post-WWII period....

The economic value of upstream research outcomes has raised increasing attention. Not only are these outcomes central to the development of many innovations, but they are also the object of many transactions in technology. This note discusses a few representative papers that try to better...

This chapter selectively surveys the literature on general purpose technologies (GPTs), focusing on incentives and aggregate growth implications. The literature on classical GPTs (steam, electricity, computers) and on classical great economic transformations (industrial revolutions, the...

This paper examines whether the sector bias of skill-biased technical change (SBTC) explains changing skill premia within countries in recent decades. First, using a two-factor, two-sector, two-country model we demonstrate that in many cases it is the sector bias of SBTC that determines SBTC’s...

In an influential paper Mankiw, Romer and Weil (1992) argue that evidence on the international disparity in levels of per-capita income and rates of growth is consistent with a standard Solow model, once it has been augmented to include human capital as an accumulable factor. In a study on...

While there is general agreement that technology differences must figure prominently in any successful account of the cross-country income variation, not much is known on the source of these technology differences. This paper examines cross-country income differences in terms of factor...

We consider an endogenous growth model in which appropriate organization fosters innovation, but because of contractibility problems, this benefit cannot be internalized. The organizational design element we focus on is the division of labour, which as Adam Smith argued, facilitates invention by...

Interpreting individual heterogeneity in terms of probability theory has proved powerful in connecting behaviour at the individual and aggregate levels. Returning to Ricardo's focus on comparative efficiency as a basis for international trade, much recent quantitative equilibrium modeling of the...

This paper examines the controversy involving international trade by employing a simple model. It analyzes the effects of unilateral technological improvements in one entity on the welfare of that entity and its trading partners. Improvements in one country are irreversible and lead to...