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. We...

Existing theories and empirical research on how innovation occurs largely assume that innovativeness is an inherent characteristic of the individual and that people with this innate ability select into jobs that require it. In this paper, we investigate whether people who do not self-select into...

Irving Berlin and Cole Porter were two of the great experimental songwriters of the Golden Era. They aimed to create songs that were clear and universal. Their ability to do this improved throughout much of their careers, as their skill in using language to create simple and poignant images...

This chapter reviews academic research on the connections between agglomeration and innovation. We first describe the conceptual distinctions between invention and innovation. We then describe how these factors are frequently measured in the data and some resulting empirical regularities....

This introduction to a special issue of EINT surveys a collection of ten papers that study various aspects of innovation and knowledge management and their impact on performance at the firm level for a number of countries. These studies have been conducted using data drawn from innovation...

This paper compares the contribution of R&D to innovation in terms of the various innovation output measures provided by the third Community Innovation Survey (CIS 3) for French manufacturing firms and in terms of accounting for inter-industry innovation differences

Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich were both great Russian painters who became pioneers of abstract art during the second decade of the twentieth century. Yet the forms of their art differed radically, as did their artistic methods and goals. Kandinsky, an experimental artist, approached...

In 1958, the French philosopher Etienne Gilson observed that "painters are related to manual laborers by a deep-rooted affinity that nothing can eliminate," because painting was the one art in which the person who conceives the work is also necessarily the person who executes it. Conceptual...

In a general equilibrium product-cycle model, lower trade barriers increase Southern purchasing power, which lifts long-run growth by increasing the profit from innovation. In the short run, factors of production must be reallocated inside firms, which lowers the opportunity cost of innovation,...

This paper proposes a framework to account for innovation similar to the usual accounting framework in production analysis and a measure of innovativity comparable to that of total factor productivity. This innovation accounting framework is illustrated using micro-aggregated firm data from the...