A patent only protects an innovator from others producing the same product, but it does not protect him from others producing better products under new patents. Therefore, one may divide up the source of competition facing an innovator into within-patent competition, which results from...

The sensitivity of employment and real wages -- hence aggregate labor income to short-run fluctuations in output varies across countries. We develop a simple theoretical model to show that, if workers, but not capitalists, are liquidity constrained, the sensitivity of an economy to exogenous...

There have been a number of econometric studies of the effect of changes in management and control on the productivity and employment of private,but not but not of public, enterprises. This paper examines the impact of changes in political administration on the productivity and employment of the...

Only about one third of the approximately 80 drugs currently used to treat cancer had been approved when the war on cancer was declared in 1971. We assess the contribution of pharmaceutical innovation to the increase in cancer survival rates in a differences in differences' framework, by...

This paper presents evidence based on establishment-level Census Bureau data concerning the effects of ownership change on the employment and wages of both central-office workers and manufacturing plant employees. We find that central offices that changed owners between 1977 and 1982 had...

Coe and Helpman(1995) have measured the extent to which technology spills over between industrialized countries through the particular channel of trade flows. This paper re-examines two particular features of their study. First, we suggest that their functional form of how foreign R&D affects...

We perform an econometric investigation of the contribution of pharmaceutical innovation to mortality reduction and growth in lifetime per capita income. In both of the periods studied (1970-80 and 1980-91), there is a highly significant positive relationship across diseases between the increase...

The nation's spending for prescription drugs has grown dramatically in recent years. Previous studies have shown that the replacement of older drugs by newer, more expensive, drugs is the single most important reason for this increase, but they did not measure how much of the difference between...

Between 1960 and 1997, life expectancy at birth of Americans increased approximately 10% - from 69.7 to 76.5 years - and it has been estimated that the value of life extension during this period nearly equaled the gains in tangible consumption. We investigate whether an aggregate health...

This paper examines the output contributions of capital and labor deployed in information systems (IS) at the firm level during the period 1988-91 throughout the business sector, using two different sources of data on these inputs. Our production function estimates suggest that there are...