It is widely recognized that the economics of distant-future events, like climate change, is critically dependent upon the choice of a discount rate. Unfortunately, it is unclear how to discount distant-future events when the future discount rate itself is unknown. In previous work, an...

Which is the tighter constraint on private sector investment: weak property rights or limited access to external finance? From a survey of new firms in post-communist countries, we find that weak property rights discourage firms from reinvesting their profits, even when bank loans are available....

Reducing emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change will require dramatic changes in the way that energy is produced and consumed. The cost of technological changes such as alternative energy sources and improved energy efficiency will play a large role in determining the...

We examine the quantitative impact of policy-induced changes in innovative investment by firms on growth in aggregate productivity and output in a model that nests several of the canonical models in the literature. We isolate two statistics, the impact elasticity of aggregate productivity growth...

Some technologies save lives -- new vaccines, new surgical techniques, safer highways. Others threaten lives -- pollution, nuclear accidents, global warming, the rapid global transmission of disease, and bioengineered viruses. How is growth theory altered when technologies involve life and death...

By reducing the costs of environmental protection, technological change is important for promoting green growth. This entails both the creation of new technologies and more widespread deployment of existing green technologies. This paper reviews the literature on environmentally friendly...

There is great interest in evaluating the impact of private equity investments on innovation and economic growth. However, there is no direct empirical evidence on the effects of such transactions on the innovation strategies of entrepreneurial firms. We fill this gap by examining a rich...

R&D is an uncertain activity with highly skewed outcomes. Nonetheless, most recent empirical studies and modeling estimates of the potential of technological change focus on the average returns to research and development (R&D) for a composite technology and contain little or no information...