We argue that a firm's organization capital depends on the state of technology when the firm was born and on the technologies that have followed. We estimate vintage effects on the value of firms from 114 years of stock market data. We find: 1) a surprisingly strong upward trend in the...

The IPOs of the Electricity/Internal Combustion revolution created more lasting value than the IPOs of the IT revolution. Stock-market data point to two explanations for this. First, computer prices have been falling much faster than did those of electricity and internal combustion in the...

A large body of evidence links financial development to economic growth, yet the channels through which inflation affects this relationship and its stability have been less thoroughly explored. We take an econometric and graphical approach to examining these channels, and find that higher levels...

Studies of early U.S. growth traditionally have emphasized real-sector explanations for an acceleration that by many accounts became detectable between 1815 and 1840. Interestingly, the establishment of the nation's basic financial structure predated by three decades the canals, railroads, and...

This paper develops a set of criteria for identifying the arrival of a general purpose technology (GPT) and applies them to the electification and IT "revolutions" of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The criteria suggest that a GPT should be 1) pervasive, 2) improving over time, and 3)...

We model Moore's Law as efficiency of computer producers that rises as a by-product of their experience. We find that (a) because computer prices fall much faster than the prices of electricity-driven and diesel-driven capital ever did, growth in the coming decades should be very fast, and that...