Firms size and directed technological change

Economic Integration, Lobbying by Firms and Workers, and Technological Change

I examine a common market with the following institutions. Oligopolistic firms improve their productivity by R&D. Wages are determined by union-employer bargaining. Firms and workers lobby the authority that accepts new members and regulates unions’ and firms’ market power. The main findings are as follows. Small common markets have incentives to expand, but large ones are indifferent to new me...

Integration, Regulation, Lobbying by Firms and Workers, and Technological Change

This paper examines an economic union where oligopolistic firms produce by skilled and unskilled labor and do R&D by skilled labor. The planner of the union accepts new members to the union, deregulates the product market through anti-trust policy and regulates the labor market through a minimum wage for unskilled labor. Firms and workers lobby the planner for prospective policy. It is shown th...

Technological Paradigms and Firms’ Interaction

This paper deals with the aggregate effects of small, exogenous but idiosyncratic technological shocks on locally interacting firms. Its main purpose is to model a situation in which technological paradigms emerge through endogenous propagation and diffusion of information leading to an aggregate pattern. We develop a theoretical framework in which large technological correlations emerge due to...

Technological Change and Technological Strategy

Technological Practice, Firms, Communities and Networks

The purpose of this paper is to explore the notion of technology as a practice and a system of connections. The Hughesian tradition in the history of technology locates technological practice in transorganisational systems, involving a variety of different actors by a central figure or entrepreneur. The Chandlerian approach privileges the firm as site of development of idiosyncratic capabilitie...