We study the importance of technology and institutions in determining the size of markets in five different countries and fifteen different German states. The setting of 19th century Europe presents a unique opportunity to address this issue, since it witnessed fundamental change in both...

The old field of Comparative Economic Systems lacked a theoretical framework, which New Institutional Economics now provides. The paper is a brief guide to NIE: its strength, weaknesses, policy implications, and future tasks. The intellectual interest in the NIE approach is directly related to...

We study the relative importance of technology and institutions as factors determining the size of markets. The setting of 19th century Europe presents a unique opportunity to address this issue, since it witnessed fundamental change in both dimensions. First, Germany went from around 1,800...

Az utóbbi egy-két évtizedben visszaszorulóban van az ipari társadalomra jellemző stabil, időhatárok nélküli (számos juttatással és biztosítékkal körülbástyázott) foglalkoztatás. Feltartóztathatatlanul terjednek ellenben az atipikus foglalkoztatás legkülönfélébb formái...

This chapter reviews academic research on the connections between agglomeration and innovation. We first describe the conceptual distinctions between invention and innovation. We then describe how these factors are frequently measured in the data and some resulting empirical regularities....

This paper explores how technological changes affected labor allocations within the U.S. Navy. During the latter nineteenth century, the officer corps was highly specialized, split between groups of line and staff officers. Developments in general purpose technologies created a dilemma for the...

In this paper, we survey the literature that studies the issue of growing inequalities in advanced countries (the North). We firstly unveil the main facts concerning widening inequality in the North and we underlie the differences between countries and groups of countries. We put forward the...

We use small Italian regions (i.e. provinces) to investigate the causal effect of foreign immigration on innovation during 2003-2008. Using instrumental variables estimation (based on immigrants' enclaves), we find that the overall stock of immigrants did not have any effect on innovation....

This chapter reviews academic research on the connections between agglomeration and innovation. We first describe the conceptual distinctions between invention and innovation. We then describe how these factors are frequently measured in the data and some resulting empirical regularities....

An increasingly influential "technological-discontinuity" paradigm suggests that IT-induced technological changes are rapidly raising productivity while making workers redundant. This paper explores the evidence for this view among the IT-using U.S. manufacturing industries. There is some...