This the inaugural issue of the International Productivity Monitor, a new publication produced by the Ottawa-based Centre for the Study of Living Standards (CSLS). The objective of the Monitor is to focus atttention on the importance of productivity for improving living standards and quality of...

This research advances the hypothesis that natural land productivity in the past, and its effect on the desirable level of cooperation in the agricultural sector, had a persistent effect on the evolution of social capital, the process of industrialization and comparative economic development...

This research advances the hypothesis that natural land productivity in the past, and its effect on the desirable level of cooperation in the agricultural sector, had a persistent effect on the evolution of social capital, the process of industrialization and comparative economic development...

The prize system for innovation has been criticized as impractical due to the lack of a workable formula or algorithm to determine the size of prizes. In this paper, a decentralized market mechanism via the intertemporal bounty (IB) system can function to duplicate Pareto optimality. Under this...

We develop a directed-technological-change model to address the issue of the optimal patent system and investigate how the optimal patent system influences the direction of technological change and the inequality of wage, where patents are categorized as skill- and labor-complementary. The major...

The prize system for innovation has been criticized as impractical due to the lack of any workable formula or algorithm to determine the size of prizes. In this paper, a decentralized market mechanism via the intertemporal bounty (IB) system can function to duplicate Pareto optimality. Under...

We present an analytical solution to the lab-equipment R&D growth model with an exogenous rate of imitation and apply it to study the optimal level of intellectual property rights (IPR) protection. This has already been studied in Kwan and Lai (2003); however, a mistake in writing out the...

The empirical analyses show that public and private R&D are strongly intertwined. On the one hand, the existence of large direct spillovers from public R&D to private industry has extensively proven. Yet, both a substitutability and complementarity relationship between private and public R&D...

We study a dynamic general equilibrium model where innovation takes the form of the introduction of new goods whose production requires skilled workers. Innovation is followed by a costly process of standardization, whereby these new goods are adapted to be produced using unskilled labor. Our...

We study a dynamic general equilibrium model where innovation takes the form of the introduction new goods, whose production requires skilled workers. Innovation is followed by a costly process of standardization, whereby these new goods are adapted to be produced using unskilled labor. Our...