The recent efflorescence of interest in "endogenous" theories of economic growth has focused attention on the nature and role of knowledge in the growth process (Romer 1986, 1990; Grossman and Helpman 1990, 1994). Unlike earlier models of growth (Solow 1956; Swan 1956) in which technological change...

Modularity is a very general set of principles for managing complexity. By breaking up a complex system into discrete modules - which can then communicate with one another only through standardized interfaces within a standardized architecture - one can eliminate what would otherwise be an...

Transaction costs, one often hears, are the economic equivalent of friction in physical systems. Like physicists, economists can sometimes neglect friction in formulating theories; but like engineers, they can never neglect friction in studying how the system actually does let alone should work....

Industrial economists tend to think of competition as occurring between atomic units called "firms." Theorists of organization tend to think about the choice among various kinds of organizational structures -- what Langlois and Robertson (1995) call "business institutions." But few have thought...

This essay analyzes critically the idea of knowledge spillovers, especially as it enters the New Growth Theory. The conventional theory of spillovers, we argue, suffers from a thin and misleading account of the nature of productive knowledge. In this model, firms undersupply R&D, which impedes...

In this essay, I attempt to take seriously Schumpeter's perspective on competition as fundamentally about innovation. Drawing on literatures that concern themselves centrally with the patterns and processes of technological change, I focus on a set of issues very much on the present-day agenda:...

Using newly constructed data series on explosions, deaths, and steamboat traffic, we examine econometrically the causes of increased safety in steamboat boilers in the nineteenth century. Although the law of 1852 (but not that of 1838) did have a dramatic initial effect in reducing explosions,...

This paper's title is an echo of Alfred Chandler's (2001) chronicle of the electronics industry, Inventing the Electronic Century. The paper attempts (A) a general reinterpretation of the pattern of technological advance in (American) electronics over the twentieth century and (B) a somewhat...

The English-language literature of technological change is one of the few areas of economic writing in which Joseph Schumpeter has maintained a following and in which he has been accorded some modicum of the attention he deserves. There has grown up within this literature a standard...