This paper studies the origins and consequences of international technology gaps. I develop an endogenous growth model where R&D efficiency varies across countries and productivity differences emerge from firm-level technology investments. The theory characterizes how innovation and learning...

We use census data to show that structural transformation reflects a fundamental reallocation of labor from goods to services, instead of a relabelling that occurs when goods-producing firms outsource their in-house service production. The novelty of our approach is that it categorizes labor by...

Aspirations towards technological sovereignty increasingly pervade the political debate. Yet, an ambiguous definition leaves the exact goal of those aspirations and the policies to fulfill them unclear. This leaves room for partly particularly negative interpretations, such as equating the...

While economic theory suggests substitutability between labor and capital, little evidence exists regarding the causal effect of labor supply on inventing labor-saving technologies. We analyze the impact of exogenous changes in regional labor supply on automation innovation by exploiting an...

This paper develops a static model of endogenous task-based technical progress to study how factor scarcity induces technological progress and changes in factor prices. The equilibrium technology is multi-dimensional and not strongly factor-saving in the sense of Acemoglu (2010). Nevertheless,...

We investigate the relationship between the presence of migrant inventors and the dynamics of innovation in the migrants’ receiving countries. We find that countries are 25 to 50 percent more likely to gain advantage in patenting in certain technologies given a twofold increase in the...

We study the gains from trade in a model with oligopolistic competition, heterogeneous firms and innovation, and provide a formula to decompose the mechanism. The new insight we provide is that market concentration can be a welfare-relevant feature of market power above and beyond markup...

Innovation is part idea generation and part development. We build a model of “innovating-bydoing,” whereby ideas come to practitioners. Successful innovation requires that practitioners’ideas be developed through costly effort. Our model nests existing theories of laboratory researchand...