We document an empirical relationship between the cross-country adoption of technologies and the degree of long-term historical relatedness between human populations. Historical relatedness is measured using genetic distance, a measure of the time since two populations’ last common ancestors....

Composition of the euro area workforce evolves over time and in response to changing labour market conditions. We construct an estimate of growth in euro area labour quality over the period 1983-2004 and show that labour quality has grown on average by 0.6% year-on-year over this time period....

In this Paper we provide empirical evidence that Antidumping (AD) Protection can induce technological catching-up by domestic firms affected by the import protection. We identify a panel of 1,793 import-competing domestic firms between 1993 and 2000, directly affected by AD cases that were...

We analyse productivity growth in UK manufacturing 1980-92 using the newly available ARD panel of establishments drawn from the Census of Production. We examine the relative importance of 'internal' restructuring (such as new technology and organizational change) and 'external' restructuring...

Many writers have claimed that R&D has two 'faces'. In addition to the conventional role of stimulating innovation, R&D enhances technology transfer by improving the ability of firms to learn about advances in the leading edge ('absorptive capacity'). In this paper we document that there has...

In this Paper we show that the main empirical findings about firm diversification and performance are actually consistent with the optimal behavior of a firm that maximizes shareholder value. In our model, diversification allows a firm to explore better productive opportunities while taking...

The paper surveys both the usefulness of endogenous innovation models of growth in economic history and the implications of historical research for new growth theorists. It is suggested that economic historians should take endogenous innovation models seriously and that this will help them to...

The EU-US total factor productivity (TFP) growth gap since the mid-1990's is concentrated in a handful of market service industries (most notably retail trade) and in ICT-producing manufacturing, whilst the EU exhibits a stronger performance in a number of the network utilities. This paper...

We use Italian firm-level data to investigate the impact of trade openness on the distribution of firms across marginal cost levels. In so doing, we implement a procedure that allows us to control not only for the standard transmission bias identified in firm-level TFP regressions but also for...

This paper uses EU firm-level panel data to estimate the effect of Antidumping (AD) protection on the productivity of EU domestic firms in import-competing industries. We find that firms with relatively low initial productivity - laggard firms - have productivity gains during AD protection,...