This paper surveys the major changes in patent policy and practice that have occurred in the last two decades in the U.S., and reviews the existing analyses by economists that attempt to measure the impacts these changes have had on the processes of technological change. It also reviews the...

The challenge of mitigating climate change has focused recent attention on basic scientific research feeding into the development of new energy technologies (Popp, 2017). Energy innovation tends to consist of a series of partially overlapping processes involving: (1) the production of scientific...

Recent attempts to endogenize technology in climate policy models have produced mixed results. Models including alternative technologies find large gains from induced technological change. However, technological progress in these models comes through learning-by-doing, which ignores the...

Despite growing empirical evidence of the link between environmental policy and innovation, most economic models of environmental policy treat technology as exogenous. For long-term problems such as climate change, this omission can be significant. In this paper, I modify the DICE model of...

This paper proposes a new and unified explanation for the following trends observed over the last 25 years: (1) the increased returns to education, (2) the slow measured growth in TFP in an economy undergoing massive changes in its methods of production, and (3) the poor wage performance,...

Wages for more- and less-educated workers have followed strikingly different paths in the U.S. and Canada. During the 1980's and 1990's, the ratio of earnings of university graduates to high school graduates increased sharply in the U.S. but fell slightly in Canada. Katz and Murphy (1992) found...

We decompose the impact of trade reform on technology adoption and land use to study how aggregate changes were driven by reallocation versus within-farm adaptation. Using detailed census data covering over 30,000 farms in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, Canada we find a range of new...

The earnings and occupational task requirements of immigrants to Canada are analyzed. The growing education levels of immigrants in the 1990s have not led to a large improvement in earnings as one might expect if growing computerization and the resulting technological change was leading to a...

This paper explores the implications of a simple model of learning and innovation by firms. In this model R&D spillovers are partly determined by firms, rather than by the given economic environment. According to this approach the full effect of spillovers on research productivity of firms...

Is public R&D spending complementary and thus "additional" to private R&D spending, or does it substitute for and tend to "crowd out" private R&D? Conflicting answers are given to this question. We survey the body of available economectric evidence accumulated over the past 35 years. A framework...