Das vorliegende Arbeitspapler fasst die Ergebnisse einer im Sommer 1988 durchgeführten schriftlichen Expertenbefragung zu den Bestimmunsfaktoren von Forschung und Entwicklung in der Schweizer Industrie zusammen. Von den 940 beragten Untemehmungen haben 358 Oder ca. 40% geantwortet; sie waren in...

We investigate how individual workers and local labour markets adjust over a long time period to a discrete and plausibly exogenous technological shock, namely the introduction of containerisation in the UK port industry. This technology, which was introduced rapidly between the mid-1960s and...

Can stringent labor laws be efficient? Possibly, if they provide firms with a commitment device to not punish short-run failures and thereby incentivize the pursuit of value-maximizing innovative activities. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence that strong labor laws indeed appear to...

We model adoption and diffusion in a commons under uncertainty about a technology’s value. Technological resource stock externalities make technology less valuable with depleted stocks, but transmit information about a new technology’s value, causing faster adoption of high-value technologies.

R&D is an uncertain activity with highly skewed outcomes. Nonetheless, most recent empirical studies and modeling estimates of the potential of technological change focus on the average returns to research and development (R&D) for a composite technology and contain little or no information...

I use a stochastic production frontier to model energy efficiency trends in 85 countries over a 37-year period. Differences in energy efficiency across countries are modeled as a stochastic function of explanatory variables and I estimate the model using the cross-section of time-averaged data,...

This paper investigates the impact of alternative environmental policy instruments on technological innovations aiming to improve energy efficiency in buildings. The empirical analysis focuses on three main types of policy instruments, namely regulatory energy standards in buildings codes,...

Recent efforts to endogenize technological change in climate policy models demonstrate the importance of accounting for the opportunity cost of climate R&D investments. Because the social returns to R&D investments are typically higher than the social returns to other types of investment, any...

Apart from the well-known weaknesses of the standard Malmquist productivity index related to infeasibility and not accounting for slacks, already addressed in the literature, we identify a new and significant drawback of the Malmquist-Luenberger index decomposition that questions its validity as...

In the recent last years, in particular in the aftermath of the global financial and economic crisis, many countries initiated economic recovery plans with a major focus on stimulating green entrepreneurial activities to revive economic growth. Further, the recovery plans intend to improve a...