We present quantitative and qualitative evidence (field research) on university technology transfer offices (TTOs). These offices negotiate licensing agreements with firms to commercialize university-based technologies. A stochastic frontier production function framework is used to assess the...

The local academic science base plays a dominant role in determining where and when biotechnology is adopted by existing firms or -- much more frequently -- exploited by new entrants in the U.S. In Japan this new dominant technology has almost exclusively been introduced through organizational...

I study knowledge spillovers, positive externalities that augment the information set of an economic agent, and reviews the evidence on such spillovers in the context of international economic transactions. Even though spillovers are by their very nature difficult to identify, over recent...

How do communication costs affect the production of new ideas and inventions? To answer this question, we study the introduction of the Uniform Penny Post in Great Britain in 1840. This reform replaced the previous system of expensive distance-based postage fees with a uniform low rate of one...

We develop a Ricardian model of trade in which countries innovate ideas that diffuse across the globe. In this model, the forces of innovation and diffusion combine to shape trade substitution patterns. Innovation makes a country technologically distinct, reducing their substitutability with...

We study the optimal allocation of R&D resources in an endogenous growth model with an innovation network, through which one sector's past innovations may benefit other sectors' future innovations. First, we provide closed-form sufficient statistics for the optimal path of R&D resource...

What prevents the spread of information among coworkers, and which management practices facilitate workplace knowledge flows? We conducted a field experiment in a sales company, addressing these questions with three active treatments. (1) Encouraging workers to talk about their sales techniques...

Unlike physical capital, human capital has both embodied and disembodied dimensions. It can be perceived of as skill and acquired knowledge, but also as knowledge spillover effects between overlapping generations and across different skill groups within and across countries. We illustrate the...

We introduce, validate, and provide a public database of a new measure of the knowledge inventors draw on: scientific references in patent specifications. These references are common and algorithmically extractable. Critically, they are very different from the "front page" prior art commonly...

A defiining feature of modern economic growth is the systematic application of science to advance technology. However, despite sustained progress in scientific knowledge, recent productivity growth in the U.S. has been disappointing. We review major changes in the American innovation ecosystem...