Several theories of firm performance can explain the well known observation that survival is positively related to age. However, a more mundane explanation-selection bias driven by variations in firm quality-may also underlie the phenomenon. This paper employs a 90 year plant-level panel data...

I report new evidence for localized knowledge spillovers identified by within-patent variations in the geographic matching rates of citations added by inventors and citations added by examiners. Evaluated at the mean citation lag, inventor citations are 20% more likely than examiner citations to...

Using a large, individual-level wage data set, we examine the impact of a major technological innovation-the steam engine-on the demand for skills in the merchant shipping industry. We find that the technical change created a new demand for engineers, a skilled occupation. It had a deskilling...

Over the last twenty years, many studies have been made of the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. The reported estimates are highly variable, and reveal an apparent dichotomy between cross-sectional and time-series studies. The former suggest that capital and energy are...