This paper studies an analytically tractable model of the formation and evolution of chains of production. Over time, entrepreneurs accumulate techniques to produce their good using goods produced by other entrepreneurs and labor as inputs. The value of a technique depends on both the...

This paper discusses the technological change and financial innovation that commercial banking has experienced during the past twenty-five years. The paper first describes the role of the financial system in economies and how technological change and financial innovation can improve social...

This paper provides empirical confirmation for Petersen and Rajan's (2002) widely accepted conjecture that information technology was the primary driver of the observed increase in small business borrower-lender distances in the United States in recent years. Using a different data source for...

The welfare gain to consumers from the introduction of personal computers is estimated here. A simple model of consumer demand is formulated that uses a slightly modified version of standard preferences. The modification permits marginal utility, and hence total utility, to be finite when the...

Why have some countries done so much better than others over the recent past? In order to shed new light on this issue, this paper provides a decomposition of the change in the distribution of output-per-worker across countries over the period 1960-98. The main finding of the paper is that most...

Italian manufacturing ¯rms have been losing ground with respect to many of their European competitors. This paper presents some empirical evidence on the e®ects of innovation on employment growth and therefore on ¯rms' productivity with the goal of understanding the roots of such poor...

How much does US-based R&D benefit other countries and through what mechanisms? We test the 'technology sourcing' hypothesis that foreign research labs located on US soil tap into US R&D spillovers and improve home country productivity. Using panels of UK and US firms matched to patent data we...

This paper investigates whether there is convergence in Total Factor Productivity towards the technological frontier at the establishment level. We find convergence to the frontier is statistically and quatatively important, suggesting the existence of technology spillovers. Foreign...

This paper provides the first firm-level econometric evidence on the skill-bias of ICT in developing countries using a unique new dataset of manufacturing firms in Brazil and India. I use detailed information on firms’ adoption of ICT and the educational composition of their workforce to...

This paper explores the causes of skill-based employment differentials within the Turkish manufacturing sector over the period 1980-2001. Turkey is taken as an example of a developing economy that, in that period, had been technologically advancing and becoming increasingly integrated with the...