Certain recently reported statistical regularities relating to the dispersion of firms' growth rates have begun to attract attention among IO economists. These relationships take the form of power law or scaling relationships and this has led to suggestions that the underlying mechanisms which...

This paper studies the role of quality competition in endogenous growth and institutional factors which can affect growth through affecting quality competition. The R&D-based growth literature as it stands attributes the incentives for innovations to monopolist market structure, and regards the...

What economic mechanisms underlie the polarization of the world economy into the 'high wage' industrialized countries and the less developed 'low wage' countries? Should we expect the two groups to converge over time, or to diverge? What economic mechanisms come into play as LDCs attempt to...

This paper reviews the recent literature on game-theoretic models of market structure and their empirical implementation.

We show that economic incentives affect the commercial value of inventions generated in universities. Using data for 102 U.S. universities during the period 1991-1999, we find that universities which give higher royalty shares to academic scientists generate higher license income, controlling...

This paper provides an empirical assessment of the effect of national and international knowledge spillovers on innovation at a finely defined sectoral level for six major industrialised countries over the period 1981-1995. International spillovers are always found to be effective in increasing...

We analyse the determinants of the decline in measured research productivity (the patent/R&D ratio)using panel data on manufacturing firms in the U.S. for the period 1980-93. We focus on three factors: the level of demand, the quality of patents, and technological exhaustion. We first develop an...

This paper sets out to model the evolution of market shares in the semiconductor industry. The time profile of market shares for different firms in this industry has shown a striking regularity over successive generations of products. In a model of vertical product differentiation three distinct...

This paper tests the presence of multiple independent submarkets in the Italian motor insurance industry. Independence is motivated by administrative boundaries among provinces and by further locational reasons. We find that the independence effects are sufficient to induce a minimum degree of...

We estimate semiparametric Engel curves for rural Pakistan using a large household survey. This allows us to obtain consistent estimates of the effects of household size and composition on consumption patterns even when these demographic variables are correlated with an unknown function of...