The Soviet Union was competing head to head with market economies in the generation of new technologies, not only in traditional industries such as steelmaking, electricity, and machineries, but also in high tech-areas such as synthetic materials and microelectronics. Yet its productivity...

The paper investigates the mechanics through which novel technological principles are developed and diffused throughout an economy consisting of a technologically heterogeneous ensemble of firms. In the model entrepreneurs invest in the discovery and in the diffusion of a technological principle...

Theoretical models of growth reveal that either exogenous or endogenous, technology is the main driving force behind the long-run economic growth. Furthermore, in the endogenous growth framework, diffusion of technology is the basic mechanism of per capita income convergence among countries....

We study the effect of railroad access on urban population growth. Using GIS techniques, we match triennial population data for roughly 1,000 cities in nineteenth-century Prussia to georeferenced maps of the German railroad network. We find positive short- and long-term effects of having a...

A method for analyzing productivity convergence based on frontier production functions is proposed. It is examined whether departures from the frontier - country-level inefficiencies - exhibit long-run relationships and convergence. The method is applied to 1-digit industries of 14 OECD...