Skill-biased technical change has occupied empirical economists for much of the 90s. However, the empirical literature has not progressed much beyond observing a positive correlation between technology indicators and demand shifts. Two hypotheses on the root causes of skill biases in technical...

Skill-biased technical change has occupied empirical economists for much of the 90s. However, the empirical literature has not progressed much beyond observing a positive correlation between technology indicators and demand shifts. Two hypotheses on the root causes of skill biases in technical...

In this paper I will focus exclusively on opportunity in the narrow sense and therefore on the origin of the required knowledge. For the purpose of this paper an opportunity exists when all reqiured elements of knowledge are "out there" and await the arrival of a keen entrepreneur to recognize,...

This paper argues that globalization has led to a shift in developed countries from an industrial to an entrepreneurial model of production. Globalization is interpreted as a level shock in the supply of unskilled labor to the world economy, a decrease in the level of political risk associated...

We formulate a model that explicitly separates two functions in the innovation process: The introduction of new goods and the quality improvement of existing goods. While the latter is performed by the corporate R&D sector, the first is performed by entrepreneurs. We show that in a three sector...

Talent allocation models assume that entrepreneurial talent is selfish and thus allocates into unproductive or even destructive activities if these offer the highest private returns. This paper experimentally analyzes other-regarding preferences of entrepreneurial talent. We find that making a...

We develop a model in which stronger protection of intellectual property rights has an inverted U-shaped effect on innovation. Intellectual property rights protection allows the incumbent firms to capture part of the rents of commercial exploration that would otherwise accrue to the...

Industrialization has long been seen as the answer to underdevelopment and poverty. First this led countries to follow protectionist import substitution policies but as these failed developing countries have opened up to trade and FDI and tried to follow strategies of export driven...

Entrepreneurship is generally regarded as a force of change, innovation, and development in modern economies. Entrepreneurs bring new and better products to markets, restore allocative efficiency through arbitrage and reinvest their profits. However, it has been argued that the same energy and...

In this paper we study how differences in the quality of countries' institutions affect the impact of natural hazards in these countries. To do so, we first build a new data set that allows us to adequately control for countries' development and geological characteristics and, importantly,...