Convergence in per capita income turns on whether technological knowledge spillovers are global or local. Global spillovers favor convergence, while a geographically limited scope of knowledge diffusion can lead to regional clusters of countries with persistently different levels of income per...

Convergence in per capita income turns on whether technological knowledge spillovers are global or local. Global spillovers favor convergence, while a geographically limited scope of knowledge diffusion can lead to regional clusters of countries with persistently different levels of income per...

This paper presents a model of international trade in differentiated intermediate goods. Because intermediates are invented through costly R&D investments, employing foreign intermediates implies sharing the return to R&D with the inventor country. We first derive how domestic productivity is...

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...

I present a model of R&D-driven growth which predicts that technology, in form of product designs and created through R&D investments, is transmitted to other domestic and foreign sectors by being embodied in differentiated intermediate goods. Empirical results are presented employing data from...

This paper presents a model of international trade in differentiated intermediate goods. Because intermediates are invented through costly R&D investments, employing foreign intermediates implies sharing the return to R&D with the inventor country. I first derive a relation of how domestic...

In the wake of falling trade costs, two central consequences in the importing economy are, first, that stronger competition through increased imports can lead to market share reallocations among domestic firms with different productivity levels (selection). Second, the increase in imports might...

Economists emphasize two channels through which import liberalization affects productivity, one operating between and the other within firms. According to the former, import competition triggers market share reallocations between domestic firms with different technological capabilities...

While there is general agreement that technology differences must figure prominently in any successful account of the cross-country income variation, not much is known on the source of these technology differences. This paper examines cross-country income differences in terms of factor...

In this paper we emphasize the contribution of technical change, broadly defined, towards productivity growth in explaining the relative East Germany-West Germany performance during the post-World War II era. We argue that previous work was excessively focused on physical capital investments...