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Crisis Innovation Policy from World War II to COVID-19

Gross, Daniel P.; Sampat, Bhaven N. - National Bureau of Economic Research - 2021

Innovation policy can be a crucial component of governments' responses to crises. Because speed is a paramount objective, crisis innovation may also require different policy tools than innovation policy in non-crisis times, raising distinct questions and tradeoffs. In this paper, we survey the...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012585399

Organizational Frictions and Increasing Returns to Automation : Lessons from AT&T in the Twentieth Century

Feigenbaum, James J.; Gross, Daniel P. - National Bureau of Economic Research - 2021

AT&T was the largest U.S. firm for most of the 20th century. Telephone operators once comprised over 50% of its workforce, but in the late 1910s it initiated a decades-long process of automating telephone operation with mechanical call switching--a technology first invented in the 1880s. We...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012794608

The Economics of Crisis Innovation Policy : A Historical Perspective

Gross, Daniel P.; Sampat, Bhaven N. - National Bureau of Economic Research - 2021

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers, researchers, and journalists have made comparisons to World War II. In 1940, a group of top U.S. science administrators organized a major coordinated research effort to support the Allied war effort, including significant investments in...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012482553

Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space

Henderson, J. Vernon - 2009

GDP growth is often measured poorly for countries and rarely measured at all for cities or subnational regions. We propose a readily available proxy: satellite data on lights at night. We develop a statistical framework that uses lights growth to augment existing income growth measures, under...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012463450

Post-1500 Population Flows and the Long Run Determinants of Economic Growth and Inequality

Putterman, Louis - 2008

state history and the timing of transition to agriculture have much better predictive power for current GDP when one looks … at the ancestors of the people who currently live in a country than when one considers the history on that country …'s ancestors. An even better predictor of current inequality in a country is the variance of early development history of the …

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012464199

Accounting for the Effect of Health on Economic Growth

Weil, David N. - 2005

I use microeconomic estimates of the effect of health on individual outcomes to construct macroeconomic estimates of the proximate effect of health on GDP per capita. I employ avariety of methods to construct estimates of the return to health, which I combine with cross-country and historical...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012467224

Appropriate Technology and Growth

Basu, Susanto - 1996

We present a model of growth and technology transfer based on the idea that technologies are specific to particular combinations of inputs. We argue that this model is more realistic than the usual specification, in which an improvement in any technique for producing a given good improves all...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012472963

The Global Spatial Distribution of Economic Activity : Nature, History, and the Role of Trade

Henderson, J. Vernon - 2016

We study the distribution of economic activity, as proxied by lights at night, across 250,000 grid cells of average area 560 square kilometers. We first document that nearly half of the variation can be explained by a parsimonious set of physical geography attributes. A full set of country...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012456530