What determines the speed of the technology diffusion? What are the consequences of diffusion? This paper presents a model to address these questions. Skilled machine-users adopt a new technology first, while unskilled users wait until machines become more reliable and accessible. The quality...

Utilising panel data for 14 East European transition economies, we find support for the hypothesis that a greater degree of export variety relative to the U.S. helps to explain relative per capita GDP levels. The empirical work relies upon some direct measures of product variety calculated from...

Investment decision-making is modeled by means of a Kohonen neural net, where neurons represent firms. This is done in order to model investments in novel fields of economic activity, that according to this model are carried out when firms recognize the emergence of a new technological pattern....

We set up a unified growth model capturing the transition of a primitive and egalitarian hunter-gatherer society, into an advanced and despotic early civilization, and finally into a more egalitarian industrial society. Agents are either landowners or landless; both earn income from human...

In this paper, we study a two-sector version of the AK model proposed by Rebelo (1991), where constant returns to capital are confined to the investment goods sector. We show that this setup, an endogenous growth extension to the model of Greenwood, Hercowitz, and Krusell (1997), reproduces...

The institution of slavery displays a puzzling historical pattern: it is found mostly at intermediate stages of agricultural development, in horticultural societies, and less frequently among hunter-gatherers and societies at more advanced agrarian stages. We explain this rise-and- fall pattern...

Economic growth and development is a complicated process that falls into the domain of many disciplines in social sciences and humanities. It is natural then to study fundamental aspects of economic growth synthesizing research in relevant fields. In this short paper, we argue that this has...

Empirically R&D expenditure moves pro-cyclically, but the pro- cyclicality is a puzzle from the Schumpeterian point of view. The paper examines the cyclical property of R&D expenditure in the context of endogenous growth, and concludes that (i) substitutability between investing in physical...

Much of the literature on the impact of R&D on economic performance is founded on the advanced countries, where the intensity of R&D expenditure has been relatively high and stable for many years. In this paper, we provide empirical estimates of the impact of R&D on the economic growth of a...

Comparing a process of labor- and capital-augmenting technical change directed by capitalists' maximization of profits with a counterfactual in which decentralized innovation decisions are governed by noncapitalist property relations, I claim that if the two economies start from the same...