The institutional foundation of economic growth extends beyond institutions that limit the grabbing hand of the state and effectively enforce contracts. Growth predicates on social institutions that foster the development and use of productivity-enhancing knowledge. In particular,...

The paper explores the long run evolution of Italy's performance in technological innovation as a function of international technology transfer, reconstructing the different phases and dimensions of Italian innovative activity, tracking the transfer of foreign technological knowledge through a...

This article provides a knowledge-based and energy-centred unified growth model of the transition from limited to sustained economic growth. We model the transition between: (i) a pre-modern organic regime defined by limited growth in per capita output, high fertility, low levels of human...

We analyze the role of risk-sharing institutions in transitions to modern economies. Transitions requires individual-level risk-taking in pursuing productivity-enhancing activities including using and developing new knowledge. Individual-level, idiosyncratic risk implies that distinct...

This research explores the effects of distance to the pre-industrial technological frontiers on comparative economic development in the course of human history. It establishes theoretically and empirically that distance to the frontier had a persistent non-monotonic effect on a country's...

Biographical information on a sample of renowned U.S. inventors is combined with information on the patents they received over their careers, and employed to highlight the implications of patent institutions for markets in inventions and for democratization. The United States deliberately...

India's emergence in the world economy over the last decade, has often, in popular discourse, been attributed, at least to a large extent, to its sustained efforts towards technological learning and capacity building. In this paper we present an overview of India's technological trajectory with...

We study a dynamic general equilibrium model where innovation takes the form of the introduction new goods, whose production requires skilled workers. Innovation is followed by a costly process of standardization, whereby these new goods are adapted to be produced using unskilled labor. Our...

We develop a Schumpeterian growth model to analyze the interaction between patent policy and firms’ internal strategies to capture value from innovations. We consider two dimensions of patent policy: backward protection against imitation and forward protection, also known as blocking patents,...

This paper analyzes how changing the expected length of intellectual property (IP) protection affects economic growth and the welfare of rich and poor consumers. The analysis is based on a product-variety model with non-homothetic preferences and endogenous markups in which, in accordance with...