We use variation in oil output among Brazilian municipalities to investigate the effects of resource windfalls. We find muted effects of oil through market channels: offshore oil has no effect on municipal non-oil GDP or its composition, while onshore oil has only modest effects on non-oil GDP...

This Paper studies the effect of knowledge diffusion on the incentives for developed countries’ (DC) firms to undertake costly transfer of production knowledge of an input to their developing countries’ (LDC) suppliers whose costs of production vary inversely with their technological effort....

This paper develops a framework to analyze the relationship between the diffusion of new technologies and the decentralization decisions of firms. Centralized control relies on the information of the principal, which we equate with publicly available information. Decentralized control, on the...

Technological progress takes the form of improvements in the quality of an array of intermediate inputs to production. In an equilibrium that is standard in the literature, all research is carried out by outsiders, and success means that the outsider replaces the incumbent as the industry...

We argue that social capital as proxied by regional trust and the Rule of Law can improve aggregate productivity through facilitating greater firm decentralization. We collect original data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production and sales decisions from Corporate Head Quarters...

This paper looks at the genesis of innovation in the United States from a territorial perspective. The analysis aims to disentangle the impact of local R&D expenditure from other contextual conditions supportive of the process of innovation. Particular emphasis is devoted to the role of...

This paper analyses the geography of innovation in China and India. Using a tailor-made panel database for regions in these two countries, we show that both countries exhibit increasingly strong polarisation of innovative capacity in a limited number of urban areas. But the factors behind this...

This paper looks at the factors driving regional growth in Mexico, paying special attention to the potentially growth-enhancing role of innovation and innovation policy. The analysis combines innovation variables with indicators linked to the formation of adequate social conditions for...

A large portion of innovators do not patent their inventions. This is a relative puzzle since innovators are often perceived to be at the mercy of imitators in the absence of legal protection. In practice, innovators however invest actively in making their products technologically hard to...