Maddison's international panel data show that technically it was the faster growth rate of the US economy that led to its overtaking the UK as economic superpower. We explore the contributing factors. Identifying the land-grant colleges system triggered by the 1862/1890 Morrill Acts (MAs) as a...

We develop measures of labor-saving and labor-augmenting technology exposure using textual analysis of patents and job tasks. Using US administrative data, we show that both measures negatively predict earnings growth of individual incumbent workers. While labor-saving technologies predict...

Life is short. That's never been more true for corporations today. An analysis of all 29,688 firms that listed from 1960 through 2009, divided into 10-year cohorts, reveals that newly listed firms in recent cohorts fail more frequently than did those in older ones. Creative destruction is...

We proxy for board members' opinions and values using directors' ancestral origins and show that diversity has costs and benefits, which lead to high performance volatility. Consistent with the idea that diverse groups experiment more, firms with ancestrally diverse boards have more numerous and...

There is increasing evidence to suggest that a fundamental source of information for farmers on how to access and use new agricultural technologies comes from interacting with neighbours. Economic research on adoption of innovations in a rural context has only partially addressed the issue of...

Does the lack of international copyrights benefit or harm developing countries? This article examines the effects of U.S. copyright piracy during a period when the U.S. was a developing country. U.S. statutes protected the copyrights of American citizens from 1790, but until 1891 deemed the...

The US decision not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and the recent outcomes of the Bonn and Marrakech Conferences of the Parties drastically reduces the effectiveness of the Kyoto Protocol in controlling GHG emissions. The reason is not only the reduced emission abatement in the US, but also the...

This study compares the estimation errors of several present value discounting conventions (end-of-year, mid-year, and the more recently proposed harmonic mean convention) for a uniform distribution of intra-period cash flow - continuous and discrete. Our results show that the mid-year...

In August 2022, the US Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a comprehensive piece of legislation aiming to stimulate the US economy and to increase its resilience. At an estimated 430 billion euros, it is a massive government investment and spending program in the welfare state,...