Innovation and technological progress are the key determinants of long-run economic growth and welfare. Therefore, an important question is, how can public policy encourage more innovation? In this chapter, I review some of the empirical findings from various recent studies on innovation and...

We study the impact of climate volatility on economic growth exploiting data on 133 countries between 1960 and 2005. We show that the conditional (ex ante) volatility of annual temperatures increased steadily over time, rendering climate conditions less predictable across countries, with...