This paper examines the sources of firm product and process innovation in Norway. It uses a purpose-built survey of 1604 firms in the five largest Norwegian city-regions to test, by means of a logit regression analysis, Jensen et al.’s (2007) contention that firm innovation is both the result...

This paper argues that an economy's transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern growth requires markets to reach a critical size, and competition to reach a critical level of intensity. By allowing an economy to produce a greater variety of goods, a larger market makes goods more...

Using the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates, I examine how immigrants perform relative to natives in activities likely to increase U.S. productivity, according to the type of visa on which they first entered the United States. Immigrants who first entered on a student/trainee visa or a...

This paper studies technological change in renewable energies, providing empirical evidence on the determinants of innovative activity with a special emphasis on the role of knowledge spillovers. We investigate two major renewable energy technologies wind and solar across a panel of 21 OECD...

What explains the world-wide trend of pro-entrepreneurial policies? We study entrepreneurial policy in a lobbying model taking into account the conflict of interest between entrepreneurs and incumbents. It is shown that international market integration leads to more pro-entrepreneurial policies....

The theoretical effects of labour regulations such as employment protection legislation (EPL) on innovation is ambiguous, and empirical evidence has thus far been inconclusive. EPL increases job security and the greater enforceability of job contracts may increase worker investment in innovative...

Informational frictions between borrowers and lenders differ across classes of borrowers. Innovative firms undertake high-risk-high-return projects which are likely to be little understood by financial intermediaries. As a consequence, they may end up allocating too large a share of funds to...

In this paper, we develop a North-South endogenous growth model to examine three phases of development in the South: imitation of Northern products; imitation and innovation; and finally, innovation only. In particular, the model has the features of catching up (and potentially overtaking),...

This paper constructs a two-region endogenous growth model, where economic geography and public infrastructures play a key role. The model allows us to analyse the contribution of different types of redistributive public policies on growth, industrial geography and spatial income distribution....

For the sample period of 1965-1992, Kortum and Lerner (2000) find that venture capital (VC) investments have a positive impact on patent count at industry level, and this impact is larger than that of R&D expenditures. We confirm that this positive impact continued to be present and became even...