We construct a simple model where political elites may block technological and institutional development, because of a ‘political replacement effect.’ Innovations often erode elites’ incumbency advantage, increasing the likelihood that they will be replaced. Fearing replacement, political...

The optimal reaction to a pending productivity shock of which the expected arrival time increases with global warming is to accumulate more precautionary capital to smooth consumption and to levy a carbon tax, proportional to the marginal hazard of a catastrophe, to curb the risk of climate...

This Paper examines the sources of the US macroeconomic miracle of 1995-2000 and attempts to distinguish among permanent sources of American leadership in high-technology industries, as contrasted with the particular post-1995 episode of technological acceleration, and with other independent...

Using a human-capital-based growth model, we show the essential role of labour mobility and cross-country tax harmonization in equalizing income levels of countries that start off from different initial income positions. Knowledge spillovers cum labour mobility are the driving forces behind the...

We construct a revised version of the Barro and Lee (1996) data set for a sample of OECD countries using previously unexploited sources and following a heuristic approach to obtain plausible time profiles for attainment levels by removing sharp breaks in the data that seem to reflect changes in...

Many writers have claimed that R&D has two 'faces'. In addition to the conventional role of stimulating innovation, R&D enhances technology transfer by improving the ability of firms to learn about advances in the leading edge ('absorptive capacity'). In this paper we document that there has...

We investigate the sources of productivity convergence using panel data for the Spanish regions. As a framwork, we develop a simple descriptive growth model which allows for factor accumulation, technological diffusion and rate effects from human capital and which includes fixed regional effects...

This Paper studies the impact of wage growth on the evolution of employment in an intertemporal general-equilibrium model with endogenous productivity growth. For real wage growth above laissez-faire levels, we obtain steady-state equilibria in which productivity grows at the same rate as wages,...

This paper analyses the sources of post-war growth and convergence in the OECD using an extension of Mankiw, Romer and Weil's (1992) model in which the rate of technical progress is determined endogenously by the level of R&D spending and a process of technological catch-up. The results indicate...

We use data on imports of computer equipment for a large sample of countries between 1970-90 to investigate the determinants of computer-technology adoption. We find strong evidence that computer adoption is associated with higher levels of human capital and with manufacturing trade openness...