Electricity and Information Technology (IT) are perhaps the two most important general purpose technologies (GPTs) to date. We analyze how the U.S. economy reacted to them. The Electricity and IT eras are similar, but also differ in several important ways. Electrification was more broadly...

This paper explores whether lobbies slow down technology diffusion. To answer this question, we exploit the differential effect of various institutional attributes that should affect the costs of erecting barriers when the new technology has a technologically close predecessor but not otherwise....

The contribution made by innovation and new technologies to economic growth and welfare is largely determined by the rate and manner by which innovations diffuse throughout the relevant population, but this topic has been a somewhat neglected one in the economics of innovation. This chapter,...

The contribution of new technology to economic growth can only be realized when and if the new technology is widely diffused and used. Diffusion itself results from a series of individual decisions to begin using the new technology, decisions which are often the result of a comparison of the...

This paper estimates the social returns to investments in innovation. The disparate spillovers associated with innovation, including imitation, business stealing, and intertemporal spillovers, have made calculations of the social returns difficult. Here we provide an economy-wide calculation...

Using a large administrate dataset covering the universe of phone calls and airtime transfers in a country over a four year period, we examine the pattern of adoption of airtime transfers over time. We start by documenting strong network effects: increased usage of the new airtime transfer...

We examine the hypothesis that the slowdown in productivity following the Great Recession was in significant part an endogenous response to the contraction in demand that induced the downturn. We first present some panel data evidence that technology diffusion is highly cyclical. We then develop...

A key decision in research is whether to try out new ideas or build on more established ideas. In this paper, we evaluate which type of work is more likely to spur further invention. When recent advances create superior opportunities for invention, their adoption as research inputs in the...

We study how opening to trade affects economic growth in a model where heterogeneous firms can choose to adopt a new technology already in use by other firms. We characterize the growth rate using summary statistics of the profit distribution--the ratio of profits between the average and...

We develop a microeconomic model of endogenous growth where clean and dirty technologies compete in production and innovation--in the sense that research can be directed to either clean or dirty technologies. If dirty technologies are more advanced to start with, the potential transition to...