This paper aims to examine the difference between US and European manufacturing before and during the World War II, focusing on the key technology in the metal-working sector: machine tools. We present a new data set covering the installed capacity of metal-working tools in the United States and...

This paper evaluates the diffusion of electricity within the context of a GPT perspective. The paper develops a new comparative data set on the usage of electricity in the manufacturing sectors of the US, Britain, France, Germany and Japan and proceeds to evaluate the hypotheses of a...

Does the concept of General Purpose Technologies help explain periods of faster and slower productivity advance in economies? The paper develops a new comparative data set on the usage of electricity in the manufacturing sectors of the USA, Britain, France, Germany and Japan and proceeds to...

This paper evaluates the link between the diffusion of electricity and the increase in labour productivity growth in the manufacturing sector during the inter-war period. A comparative analysis of the USA, Britain, Germany, and Japan shows that the trend acceleration in labour productivity is...

We here expand the static tax competition models in symmetric small regions, which were indicated by Zodrow and Mieszkowski (1986) and Wilson (1986), to a dynamic tax competition model in large regions, taking consideration of the regional asymmetry of productivity of public capital and the...