This paper studies technological change in renewable energies, providing empirical evidence on the determinants of innovative activity with a special emphasis on the role of knowledge spillovers. We investigate two major renewable energy technologies wind and solar across a panel of 21 OECD...

This paper examines whether, given the increasing salience of subnational governments, political decentralisation has an impact on overall economic performance. It uses panel data analyses in order to determine the association between a number of the different indices of political...

We draw attention to the role of economic geography in explaining important cross-sectional facts which are difficult to account for in existing models of industrialization. By construction, closed-economy models that stress the role of local demand in generating sufficient expenditure on...

This paper argues that an economy's transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern growth requires markets to reach a critical size, and competition to reach a critical level of intensity. By allowing an economy to produce a greater variety of goods, a larger market makes goods more...

Does foreign entry improve host country productivity and welfare? Existing studies have focused on the role of technology spillovers and backward linkages with domestic suppliers. In this paper, we study how these externalities are affected by technological incompatibilities between foreign and...

Empirical studies provide evidence of positive spillovers from multinational firms to upstream suppliers coupled with negative spillovers to firms in the same industry. This paper shows that these empirical regularities can be rationalized in a model with incompatibilities between foreign and...

This paper provides a unified growth theory, i.e. a model that explains the very long-run economic and demographic development path of industrialized economies, stretching from the pre-industrial era to present-day and beyond. Making strict use of Malthus’ (1798) so-called preventive check...

This research argues that variations in the interplay between cultural assimilation and cultural diffusion have played a significant role in giving rise to differential patterns of economic development across the globe. Societies that were geographically less vulnerable to cultural diffusion,...