Policy in developed countries is often based on the assumption that higher business ownership rates induce economic value. Recent microeconomic empirical evidence casts doubts on the validity of this assumption or, at least, leads to a more nuanced view: Especially the top performing business...

This paper studies the diffusion of multiple, related technologies among firms. The results suggest an endogenous acceleration mechanism of technology adoption: The more advanced a firm is in using a particular set of technologies, the more likely it is to adopt additional, related technologies....

This article presents a model of sequential decisions about investments in environmentally dirty and clean technologies, which extends the path-dependence framework of Arthur (1989). This allows us to evaluate if and how an economy locked into a dirty technology can be unlocked and move towards...

This paper investigates the relation between human capital andretirement when the age of retirement is endogenous. This relation isexamined in a life-cycle earnings model. An employee works full timeuntil retirement. The worker accumulates human capital by training-on-the-job and by...

We analyze the impact of obsolescence of economic inventions by incorporating maintenance costsin the endogenous growth model of expanding product varieties. This contrasts with the existingliterature, which ignores maintenance costs and uses the model of quality improvements todescribe...

This paper analyses the adoption of energy-efficiency enhancing technologies by heterogeneous firms. The fact that energy use does not only cause external environmental costs through pollution, but also directly affects the profitability of the firm and hence its behaviour on input and output...

We build a directed technical change model of the British Industrial Revolution where one intermediate goods sector uses a fixed renewable energy (“wood”) quantity, and another uses coal at a fixed price. With a high enough elasticity of substitution between the two goods in producing final...

World and U.S. energy intensities have declined over the past century, falling at an average rate of approximately 1.2–1.5 percent a year. The decline has persisted through periods of stagnating or even falling energy prices, suggesting the decline is driven in large part by autonomous...