This volume was prepared by Sebastian Benz while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. All chapters discuss different...

Licensing is one of the major sources of international technology transfer to developing countries. This paper clarifies how strengthening intellectual property rights (IPRs) affect innovation and licensing by making use of a quality-ladder type of dynamic general equilibrium model. We explore...

We study the role of increased outsourcing of production to a low wage country on relative wages across countries and innovation incentives. In particular, we examine the following causal forces behind an increase in the extent of international outsourcing: 1) a reduction in the resource...

I develop a model for a small, open, technology-lagging economy that imports leading-edge knowledge from the technology leader by paying high-skilled researchers from the leading country their opportunity cost to train the lagging country's future high-skilled workers while adding to a local...

Job polarization the rise in employment shares of high and low skill jobs at the expense of middle skill jobs occurred in the US not just recently, but also in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We argue that in each case polarization resulted from increased automation, and...

This article shows - on both conceptual and empirical grounds - the importance of business cycles in affecting key relationships between innovation and international performance. While periods of upswing are characterised by a well documented 'virtuous circle'. between innovation inputs, new...

Recent evidence on world trade patterns reveals North-South specialization across products of the same industries and product groups but different quality, which is not matched by the predictions of traditional and new trade theory. This paper analyzes a model of North-South trade and endogenous...

We analyze the impact of obsolescence of economic inventions by incorporating maintenance costsin the endogenous growth model of expanding product varieties. This contrasts with the existingliterature, which ignores maintenance costs and uses the model of quality improvements todescribe...

This article shows - on both conceptual and empirical grounds - the importance of business cycles in affecting key relationships between innovation and international performance. While periods of upswing are characterised by a well documented 'virtuous circle'. between innovation inputs, new...

We present a class of dynamic general-equilibrium models of education, innovation and technology transfer to explain the evolution of industries and aggregate growth in closed and open economies. Firms employ educated workers in order to develop higher-quality products. The realization of...