The recent efflorescence of interest in "endogenous" theories of economic growth has focused attention on the nature and role of knowledge in the growth process (Romer 1986, 1990; Grossman and Helpman 1990, 1994). Unlike earlier models of growth (Solow 1956; Swan 1956) in which technological change...

The entrepreneurial theory of the firm argues that entrepreneurship, properly understood, is a crucial but neglected element in explaining the nature and boundaries of the firm. By contrast, the theory of the entrepreneurial firm presumably seeks not to understand the nature and boundaries of...

Transaction costs, one often hears, are the economic equivalent of friction in physical systems. Like physicists, economists can sometimes neglect friction in formulating theories; but like engineers, they can never neglect friction in studying how the system actually does let alone should work....

Industrial economists tend to think of competition as occurring between atomic units called "firms." Theorists of organization tend to think about the choice among various kinds of organizational structures -- what Langlois and Robertson (1995) call "business institutions." But few have thought...

This paper's title is an echo of Alfred Chandler's (2001) chronicle of the electronics industry, Inventing the Electronic Century. The paper attempts (A) a general reinterpretation of the pattern of technological advance in (American) electronics over the twentieth century and (B) a somewhat...

Modularity is a very general set of principles for managing complexity. By breaking up a complex system into discrete modules - which can then communicate with one another only through standardized interfaces within a standardized architecture - one can eliminate what would otherwise be an...

Institutional factors, especially those embodied in capabilities and routines, can both improve the ability of a firm to exploit an existing technology and make it more difficult to innovate by generating an inertia that is hard to overcome. As a result, periods of technological change are often...

Alfred Chandler's portrayal of the managerial revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries does not extend well into the late twentieth century, when widespread vertical disintegration began replacing the classical multi-unit managerial enterprise. This paper attempts to...

In neoclassical theory, knowledge generates increasing returns - and therefore growth - because it is a public good that can be costlessly reused once created. In fact, however, much knowledge in the economy is actually tacit and not easily transmitted -and thus not an obvious source of...