This paper examines how international flows of technological knowledge affect economic performance across industries and firms in different countries. Motivated by the large share of the world's technology investments made by firms that are active across borders, we focus on international trade...

Recent efforts to endogenize technological change in climate policy models demonstrate the importance of accounting for the opportunity cost of climate R&D investments. Because the social returns to R&D investments are typically higher than the social returns to other types of investment, any...

We study the importance of technology and institutions in determining the size of markets in five different countries and fifteen different German states. The setting of 19th century Europe presents a unique opportunity to address this issue, since it witnessed fundamental change in both...

It follows from Hicks' induced innovation hypothesis that rising energy prices in the last two decades should have induced energy-saving innovation. We formulate the hypothesis concretely using a product-characteristics model of energy-using consumer durables, augmenting Hicks' hypothesis to...

Within the field of environmental economics, the role of technological change has received much attention. The long-term nature of many environmental problems, such as climate change, makes understanding the evolution of technology an important part of projecting future impacts. Moreover, in...

Employing a sample of renowned U.S. inventors that combines biographical detail with information on the patents they received over their careers, we highlight the impact of early U.S. patent institutions in providing broad access to economic opportunity and in encouraging trade in new...

I discuss the concept and empirical importance of international technology diffusion from the point of view of recent work on endogenous technological change. In this literature, technology is viewed as technological knowledge. I first review the major concepts, and how international technology...

The growth of the U.S. economy over the nineteenth century was characterized by a sharp acceleration in the rate of inventive activity and a dramatic rise in the relative importance of highly specialized inventors as generators of new technological knowledge. Relying on evidence compiled from...

Environmental policy discussions increasingly focus on issues related to technological change. This is partly because the environmental consequences of social activity are frequently affected by the rate and direction of technological change, and partly because environmental policy interventions...

Recent scholarly literature explains the spread of in-house research labs during the early 20th century by pointing to the information problems involved in contracting for technology. We argue that these difficulties have been overemphasized and that in fact a substantial trade in patented...