Most firms achieve perfective progress, incrementally improving commodities or productivity. But technological progress is concentrated in a few firms achieving metamorphic progress: forming or transforming industries with technological breakthroughs (e.g., biotechnology, lasers, semiconductors,...

Scientist-entrepreneurs prominent in biotech and other high-technology industries view going public not as a cost-effective source of capital but as a cross between selling a now-proven innovation and winning a lottery. Unlike most empirical IPO analyses confined to those firms that go public,...

This paper discusses recent evidence on the imperfect international substitutability of goods and assets and the implications for conduct of monetary policy in a major industrial country. A simple model is developed for analysis of the simultaneous determination of money growth and the balance...

Chinese rural industry has grown three times faster than national GDP, surpassing agriculture in size in 1987, and now nearing half of the total Chinese economy. We use a rich, new county-level data set to explore this dramatic growth. We find that a Cobb-Douglas production function explains...

A major conceptual error in the standard BLS and Lebergott unemployment estimates for 1933-1943 is reported. Emergency workers (employees of federal contracyclical programs such as WPA) were counted as unemployed on a normal-jobs-to-be-created instead of job-seekers unemployment definition. For...

Research on the nanoscale has revolutionized areas of science and has begun to have an impact on, and be impacted by, society and economy. We are capturing early traces of these processes in NanoBank, a large scale, multi-year project to provide a public data resource which will link individuals...