In this paper we develop a new methodology for finding optimal government policies in economies with heterogeneous agents. The methodology is solely based on three classes of equilibrium conditions from the government's and individual agent's optimization problems: 1) the first order conditions;...

This paper estimates the effects of innovations on productivity growth and the productivity elasticity of R&D capital. Firms need to introduce or improve products or production processes over time first to satisfy market needs, second to cope with increased competition from diffusion phenomena....

This paper investigates whether failure in innovation at the firm level can account for cross-country heterogeneity in manufacturing productivity growth. There is no strong evidence in the literature on the existence of such link. Our work, however, differs in a number of ways from much of the...

Unlike in Asia, the manufacturing sector has not (yet) become a driver of structural change in Africa. One common explanation is that the natural resource-focus of many African economies leads to Dutch disease effects. To test this argument for the case of newly found oil in Ghana we develop a...

Economy-wide rebound effects may undermine climate policies relying on energy efficiency improvements. However, available rebound estimates diverge widely. We illustrate the crucial role of model assumptions of household heterogeneity and elasticities. A computable general equilibrium model of...

Climate change damage (or, more correctly, impact) functions relate variations in temperature (or other climate variables) to economic impacts in various dimensions, and are at the basis of quantitative modeling exercises for the assessment of climate change policies. This document provides a...

Climate change damage (or, more correctly, impact) functions relate variations in temperature (or other climate variables) to economic impacts in various dimensions, and are at the basis of quantitative modeling exercises for the assessment of climate change policies. This document provides a...

Matched worker-firm data from Danish manufacturing reveal that 1) industries differ in within-firm worker skill dispersion, and 2) the correlation between within-firm skill dispersion and productivity is positive in industries with higher average skill dispersion. We argue that these patterns...

In the recent past, interest of Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) policies to influence the innovation behaviour of firms has been increased considerably. This gives rise to the notion of behavioural additionality, broadening traditional evaluation concepts of input and output...

2002 Pew Global Attitudes survey shows that workers' support for free trade decreases with age. The relation between age and supporting free trade is a phenomenon previously unexplored by economists. We study distributional effects of trade liberalization, in particular age and gains from free...