The recent work on misallocation argues that aggregate productivity in poor countries is low because various market frictions prevent marginal products from being equalized. By focusing on such allocative inefficiencies, misallocation is construed as a purely static phenomenon. This paper argues...

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...

Can the increasing significance of knowledge-products in national income - the growing weightless economy - influence economic development? Those technologies reduce ''distance'' between consumers and knowledge production. This paper analyzes a model embodying such a reduction. The model shows...

This paper studies the role of intrinsic motivation, reputation and reciprocity in driving open source software innovation. We exploit the observed pattern of contributions – the ‘revealed preference’ of developers – to infer the underlying incentives. Using detailed information on code...

Cumulative innovation is central to economic growth. Do patent rights facilitate or impede such follow-on innovation? This paper studies the effect of removing patent protection through court invalidation on the subsequent research related to the focal patent, as measured by later citations. We...

This paper develops a model to understand mechanisms behind the rise of mass consumption societies. The development process depicted in the model follows the Flying Geese pattern, in which a series of industries takes off one after another. As productivity improves in these industries, each...

We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from 732 medium sized manufacturing firms in the US, France, Germany and the UK. These measures of managerial practice are strongly associated with firm-level productivity, profitability, Tobin’s Q, sales growth and survival...

We test the hypothesis that information and communication technologies (ICT) “polarize” labor markets, by increasing demand for the highly educated at the expense of the middle educated, with little effect on low-educated workers. Using data on the US, Japan, and nine European countries from...

Studies of firm-level data have shown that there is a huge dispersion of productivity across firms even when industries are narrowly defined. So there is a significant opportunity for the least productive firms to catch up to the most productive. The formers’ convergence could therefore...

Economists have long been sceptical of claims about the 'death of distance' - the idea that new technology has diminished the significance of geography for economic outcomes. Research by Sokbae Lee, Rachel Griffith and John Van Reenen, which looks at patent citations over a quarter of a century,...