Leveraging a new measure of patent citation trees (Corredoira & Banerjee, 2015), we demonstrate that research funded by the federal government is likely to spark more active technological trajectories. Our findings tie government funding to the generation of breakthrough inventions. The...

We consider an important class of research and development (R&D) investments in public and private entities that require selection from a large number of proposals such that: (1) the potential monetary value of the proposals is not a first-order factor in the selection; and (2) the investments...

This paper integrates findings from several different case studies on Mission-Oriented Innovation Policies (MOIPs) and makes use of existing literature to briefly describe three other missions: The War on Cancer, homeownership in the United States, and the Swedish Million Program. Together with...

We study the cyclicality of public R&D in 28 OECD countries (1995-2017). While procyclical on average, public R&D reacts asymmetrically over different phases of the business cycle and becomes acyclical during recessions. It is also heterogeneous across countries: Innovation leaders and followers...

This paper introduces preliminary evidence from a cross-country database of policy characteristics and potential uses of that database. While most databases have emphasized either the content of policies (e.g., size of government deficits) or countries&' formal institutions (e.g., political...

It has been shown that higher capital taxes can have a growth-enhancing effect when combined with a revenue-compensating cut in wage taxes (Uhlig and Yanagawa 1996; European Economic Review 40, 1521-1540) or with an expansion in productivity-increasing public services (Rivas 2003; European Economic...

In oligopolistic industries that are unionised and may be affected by offshoring, falling offshoring costs have a moderating effect on trade unions. They will accept lower sector wages in order to discourage mobile forms from leaving the country. Since such wages are independent of the workers'...

In this paper, we challenge the conventional wisdom that due to the negative correlation between family size and earning ability, family size can be used as a 'tagging' device, and calls for subsidizing children (via child allowances) to enhance egalitarian objectives. We show that the case for...

This paper considers the implications of complementarity in private production and constraints on government for optimal fiscal policy. Using an endogenous growth model with public finance, it derives three central results which modify findings in the literature under standard assumptions....

This paper develops a Mirrlees (1971) framework with heterogeneous agents to analyze optimal redistributive taxes, optimal provision of public goods and the marginal cost of public funds (MCF). Standard MCF measures are shown to suffer from three defects: i) The MCF for the (non-individualized)...