We develop a Ricardian model to explore the role of trade in spreading the benefits of" innovation. The theory delivers an equation for bilateral trade that gravity specification, but identifies underlying parameters of technology. We estimate the" equation using trade in manufactures among the...

This paper investigates an empirical puzzle in technology adoption for developing countries: the low adoption rates of technologies like hybrid maize that increase average farm profits dramatically. I offer a simple explanation for this: benefits and costs of technologies are heterogeneous, so...

We study optimal dynamic trade policies in an Eaton-Kortum model with technology diffusion through trade. The process of innovation and diffusion is one in which new ideas are combined with insights from others. Trade thus affects technology by determining the distribution from which producers...

We document three facts about the global diffusion of surveillance AI technology, and in particular, the role played by China. First, China has a comparative advantage in this technology. It is substantially more likely to export surveillance AI than other countries, and particularly so as...

Convergence in per capita income turns on whether technological knowledge spillovers are global or local. Global spillovers favor convergence, while a geographically limited scope of knowledge diffusion can lead to regional clusters of countries with persistently different levels of income per...

Economists devote too much attention to international flows of goods and services and not enough to international flows of ideas. Traditional trade flows are an imperfect substitute for flows of the underlying ideas. The simplest textbook trade model shows that a welfare-enhancing move toward...

The "market for innovation" -- the sale and licensing of patents -- is an often discussed source of incentives to invest in R&D. This article presents and estimates a model of the transfer and renewal of patents that, under some assumptions, allows us to quantify the gains resulting from the...

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...

We study the global innovation and diffusion of ideas by introducing trade into the model in Eaton and Kortum (1999) (EK). This extension allows us to use international trade flows and country-level factor costs to estimate both the intensity of innovation within countries over time and...