We develop a model of growth driven by successive improvements in `General Purpose Technologies' (GPTs), such as the steam engine, electricity, or micro-electronics. Each new generation of GPTs prompts investments in complementary inputs and impacts the economy after enough such compatible...

There is widespread agreement about the important role played by Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the US productivity revival and in the evolving US-EU productivity gap. In Israel, the ICT sector grew very rapidly during the 1990s and became a hotbed of innovation and...

This Paper seeks to analyse the nature of the terrorist threat following 9/11, and to explore the implications for defense R&D policy. First, it reviews the defining trends of defense R&D since the Cold War, and brings in pertinent empirical evidence: the US accumulated during the 1990s a...

This Paper describes the database on US patents that we have developed over the past decade, with the goal of making it widely accessible for research. We present main trends in US patenting over the last 30 years, including a variety of original measures constructed with citation data, such as...

The steam engine is widely regarded as the icon of the Industrial Revolution and a prime example of a ‘General Purpose Technology,’ and yet its contribution to growth is far from transparent. This Paper examines the role that a particular innovative design in steam power, the Corliss engine,...

The goal of this paper is to lay out a methodology and corresponding computer algorithms, that allow us to extract the detailed data on inventors contained in patents, and harness it for economic research. Patent data has long been used in empirical research in economics, and yet the information...