Existing indicators of technical change are plagued by shortcomings. I present here new measures based on books published in the field of technology that resolve many of these problems and use them to identify the impact of technology shocks on economic activity. They are positively linked to...

The water-mill, though known in the Roman Empire from the second century BCE, did not come to enjoy any widespread use until the 4 th or 5 th centuries CE, and then chiefly in the West, which was then experiencing not only a rapid decline in the supply of slaves, but also widespread...

New indications of managerial innovations are created and then used to show that changes in organizational technologies are an important source of economic growth. Specifically, the analysis demonstrates that, first, in response to a positive managerial technology shock, output, productivity and...

We consider an endogenous growth model in which appropriate organization fosters innovation, but because of contractibility problems, this benefit cannot be internalized. The organizational design element we focus on is the division of labour, which as Adam Smith argued, facilitates invention by...