This survey discusses the effect of macroeconomic fluctuations on long-run growth from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. It emphasizes the ‘opportunity cost’ approach, which states that firms will intertemporally substitute productivity-enhancing activities for regular production...

This paper develops a model to analyse the implications of firing costs on incentives for R&D and international specialization. The key idea is that, to avoid paying firing costs, the country with a rigid labour market will tend to produce relatively secure goods, at late stages in their product...

The Internet plays a growing role in the economy. This paper extrapolates this trend and analyses a world where most transactions take place in "cyberspace". We ask the following question: how does the design of the search engine affect the incentives to innovate and the economy’s long run...

We study and endogenous growth model where a profit-motivated R&D sector coexists with the introduction of free blueprints invented by philanthropists. These goods are priced at marginal cost, contrary to proprietary ones, which are produced by a monopoly owned by the inventor. We show that...