We explore the determinants of research specialization across countries and its consequences for relative wages. Using a dynamic Ricardian model we examine the effects of faster international technology diffusion and lower trade barriers on the incentive to innovate. In the absence of any...

In many growth models, economic growth arises from people creating ideas, and the long-run growth rate is the product of two terms: the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present a wide range of evidence from various industries, products, and firms showing that...

Researchers have long hypothesized that spillovers from government, university, and private company R&D contribute to economic growth, but these contributions may be difficult to measure when they take a non-pecuniary form. The growth of networking devices and the Internet in the 1990s and 2000s...

While openness to trade is a well-recognized hallmark of many successful emerging market economies known as "growth miracles," another component of the growth model is a leapfrogging strategy - the use of policies to guide the industrial structural transformation ahead of a country's factor...

The adoption and diffusion of technological knowledge is generally regarded as a key element in a country's economic success. However, as is the case with most types of information, the transfer of technological knowledge is likely to be subject to adverse selection problems. In this paper we...

In this paper we: (1) estimate the effects of international R&D spillovers on total factor productivity growth of the seven largest industrialized countries (G-7); (2) analyze the effect of spillovers on the structure of production, i.e., the effects on factor demand such as labor and investment...

We test the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on economic growth in a cross-country regression framework, utilizing data on FDI flows from industrial countries to 69 developing countries over the last two decades. Our results suggest that FDI is an important vehicle for the transfer of...

In this paper, we examine one channel through which the trade regime might affect growth in the long run. We model endogenous technological progress that results from profit maximizing investments by far-sighted entrepreneurs. Productivity in the research lab depends upon the "stock of knowledge...

We study how opening to trade affects economic growth in a model where heterogeneous firms can choose to adopt a new technology already in use by other firms. We characterize the growth rate using summary statistics of the profit distribution--the ratio of profits between the average and...