The accumulation of knowledge and its application to a variety of human needs is a discontinuous process that involves innovation and change. While much has been written on major discontinuities associated, for instance, with the rise of new technologies during industrial revolutions, other...

Learning or experience curves are widely used to estimate cost functions in manufacturing modeling. They have recently been introduced in policy models of energy and global warming economics to make the process of technological change endogenous. It is not widely appreciated that this is a...

This paper develops and analyzes a macroeconomic model in which aggregate growth and fluctuations arise from the discovery and diffusion of new technologies; there are no exogenous aggregate shocks. The temporal behavior of aggregates is driven by individuals' efforts to innovate and/or make use...

Why is it that adopting new technologies takes so long and costs so much? Clearly, firms do not know all the details necessary to implement a complex technology efficiently; learning these details requires extensive search. However, this explanation has a problem: even limited search may be so...

Many environmental policies including the Kyoto Protocol, the Acid Rain Program, the Montreal Protocol and the phase-out of leaded gas are designed to achieve a target level of abatement within a specified period of time. This paper examines how pollution abatement should be allocated over time...

This chapter reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on learning by doing. Many of the distinctive theoretical implications of learning by doing have been derived under the assumption that the cost–quantity relationships observed in numerous empirical studies are largely the result of...

It is critical that technology recipients have the prerequisite knowledge and scientific base to best exploit the information. This includes domestic private and public research laboratories and universities, in addition to a sound basis of technical skills and human capital. Each of these may...