The incredible profits of Initial Public Offerings have often been emphasized in the media as a popular investment for the public. This paper takes a few steps towards refuting such an assertion by investigating the performance of 2,895 venture capital backed IPOs between 1968 and September...

What is the optimal system of intellectual property rights to encourage innovation? Empirical evidence from economic history can help to inform important policy questions that have been difficult to answer with modern data: 1) Does the existence of strong patent laws encourage innovation? And 2)...

We analyze the joint dynamics of religious beliefs, scientific progress and coalitional politics along both religious and economic lines. History offers many examples of the recurring tensions between science and organized religion, but as part of the paper's motivating evidence we also uncover...

The author argues that although the collapse of the Doha “Development” Round in early summer of 2006 was triggered by the refusal of the United States to agree to the reduction of the ceiling on the amount of domestic subsidies paid to the US farmers, there were some fundamental reasons...

November 1998 - Revised March 2000 <p> The concept of path dependence refers to a property of contingent, non-reversible dynamical processes, including a wide array of biological and social processes that can properly be described as "evolutionary." To dispell existing confusions in the literature,...</p>

This paper investigates the impact of “learning-by-producing” on inventive activity and shows that, in both emerging (electrical equipment and supplies) and maturing (shoes and textiles) industries, the geographic association between invention andproduction was rather weak during the Second...

This paper presents a History Friendly Model which addresses the issue of the bifurcation in "technological styles" between US and Britain during the nineteenth century. The model aims at gaining a better understanding of the micro-dynamics that gave rise to different patterns of innovation in...

This paper investigates the impact of ¡§learning-by-producing¡¨ on inventive activity and shows that, in both emerging (electrical equipment and supplies) and maturing (shoes and textiles) industries, the geographic association between invention and production was rather weak during the...

This paper argues that the ability to keep innovations secret may be a key determinant of patenting. To test this hypothesis, the paper examines a newly-collected data set of more than 7,000 American and British innovations at four world's fairs between 1851 and 1915. Exhibition data show that...