To stay on top of global competition, firms and governments often need to acquire innovative goods and services, including ideas and research, from their strategic suppliers. A careful design of procurement policy is crucial to make potential suppliers generate and sell the most suitable...

The open source model is a form of software development in which the source code is made available, free of charge, to all interested parties; further users have the right to modify and extend the program. Open source software (OSS) methods rely on developers who reveal the source code under an...

In industries with network effects, incumbents’ installed bases create barriers to entry that discourage entrepreneurs from developing new innovations. Yet, entry is not the only commercialization route for entrepreneurs. We show that the option of selling to an incumbent increases innovation...

In the wake of falling trade costs, two central consequences in the importing economy are, first, that stronger competition through increased imports can lead to market share reallocations among domestic firms with different productivity levels (selection). Second, the increase in imports might...

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...

Do legal institutions governing financial contracts affect the nature of real investments in the economy? We develop a simple model and provide evidence that the answer to this question is yes. We consider a levered firm's choice of investment between innovative and conservative technologies, on...

The recent emergence in the industrial organization literature of a wave of studies identifying small firms as being at least as innovative as their larger counterparts poses something of a paradox. Where do small firms get their knowledge generating inputs? The purpose of this paper is to link...

The aim of this paper is to understand whether international trade may enhance innovation and growth through an increase in competition. We develop a two-country endogenous growth model, both countries producing the same set of goods, with firm specific R&D and a continuum of oligopolistic...

This paper looks at Austria's pattern of development and its lessons for Eastern Europe. Austria's development path is characterized by three features. In the post-war era Austria was among the countries with the fastest convergence rate. At the same time Austria's movement up the technological...

This paper analyses the geography of innovation in China and India. Using a tailor-made panel database for regions in these two countries, we show that both countries exhibit increasingly strong polarisation of innovative capacity in a limited number of urban areas. But the factors behind this...