I speculate that technological spillover effects may have become more important over time as IT penetrated the U.S. economy. The rationale is that IT may speed up the process of knowledge transfer and make these knowledge spillovers more effective. Using US input-output tables for years 1958,...

Researchers have long hypothesized that spillovers from government, university, and private company R&D contribute to economic growth, but these contributions may be difficult to measure when they take a non-pecuniary form. The growth of networking devices and the Internet in the 1990s and 2000s...

Using a 1993 Dutch policy reform and a regression discontinuity design, we find children of parents whose disability insurance (DI) eligibility was reduced are 11% less likely to participate in DI themselves, do not alter their use of other government programs, and earn 2% more as adults. The...

This paper studies the causes and consequences of the adoption of technology by hospitals and public emergency response systems, focusing on Basic and Enhanced 911 services. Basic 911 allows people within a given locality to access specialized call-takers and ambulance dispatchers using the...

This paper examines how industrial policy - specifically tariff liberalization and tax subsidies - affects the magnitude and direction of FDI spillovers. We examine these spillover effects across the diverse ownership structure of China's manufacturing sector. Using this approach, we control for...

In this paper we nonparametrically analyze the effects of reallocating individuals across social groups in the presence of social spillovers. Individuals are either 'high' or 'low' types. Own outcomes may vary with the fraction of high types in one's social group. We characterize the average...

Studies of firm-level data have shown that a firm's R&D and the R&D of other firms increase conventional factor productivity. We investigate these phenomena further by examining the relationship between plant-level productivity and firm-level R&D. We find that (1) the productivity-enhancing...

This paper builds a theory of the distribution of TFP across countries. The theory is based on the hypothesis that TFP improvements in a given country follow a Nelson-Phelps specification: they derive from past investments in the country itself and, through a spillover term, from past...

There has been an increased interest in the efficacy of industrial policy. We show that policy design for vertically-related industries hinges on the nature of market interactions as well as technological linkages. Using a model in which final-good producers realize productivity gains from...

The literature on the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) and activities of multinational enterprises (MNEs) on host-countries has been almost exclusively focused on issues of productivity, growth and wages. We argue that this leaves quite a bit of important unexplored areas of inquiry,...