In many growth models, economic growth arises from people creating ideas, and the long-run growth rate is the product of two terms: the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present a wide range of evidence from various industries, products, and firms showing that...

A recent explanation for declining GDP growth is that R&D has gotten harder. The formal explanation in Jones (1995) is “fishing out”-- idea discovery decreases in the level of knowledge. If valid, long-run growth is exogenous. In follow-on empirical work, Bloom, Jones, Van Reenen and Webb...

In many growth models, economic growth arises from people creating ideas, and the long-run growth rate is the product of two terms: the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present a wide range of evidence from various industries, products, and firms showing that...