So long as the entry and exit of firms using the generic technology sets the price in an industry, one or more price-taking firms can coexist with proprietary technologies yielding more or less substantial quasi-rents to the sunk development costs. Consumer welfare is increased if an innovator...

Multinational firms that use domestic technologies in foreign locations are required to pay royalties from foreign users to domestic owners. Foreign governments often tax these royalty payments. High royalty tax rates raise the cost of imported technologies. This paper examines the effect of...

The inefficiencies related to endogenous product creation and variety under monopolistic competition are two-fold: one static--the misalignment between consumers and producers regarding the value of a new variety; and one dynamic--time variation in markups. Quantitatively, the welfare costs of...

The importance of new technologies derives from the fact that they spread across many different users and uses, as well as different geographic regions. The diffusion of technological improvements, across producers within a country and across international borders, is critical for long run...

We present a tractable model for the analysis of the relationship between economic growth and the intensive and extensive margins of technology adoption. At the aggregate level, our model is isomorphic to a neoclassical growth model. The microeconomic underpinnings of growth come from technology...

This paper considers the observational implications of social influences on adoption decisions for an environment of perfect foresight adopters. We argue that social influences can produce two observable effects: 1) discontinuities in unconditional adoption curves and 2) pattern reversals in...

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...

Estimation of our model for a sample of 19 technologies, 21 countries, and the period 1870-1998 reveals that embodied productivity growth is large for many of the technologies in our sample. On average, increases in the variety of vintages available is a more important source of growth than the...

In this paper, we develop a theoretical model of university licensing to explain why university license contracts often include payment types that differ from the fixed fees and royalties typically examined by economists. Our findings suggest that milestone payments and annual payments are...

We look at disaggregated imports of various types of equipment to make inferences on cross-country differences in the composition of equipment investment. We make three contributions. First, we document strikingly large differences in investment composition. Second, we explain these differences...