This paper investigates the impact that human capital, information and communication technology (ICT) and foreign direct investment (FDI) have on GDP. Crosssectional data from a set of 20 OECD and 24 non-OECD countries in 2007 are analysed employing data envelopment analysis (DEA) and classification and regression tree (CART) techniques. The paper illustrates that the level and quality of acces...

We investigate empirically how the Japanese patent system has affected postwar growth in Japanese total factor productivity. The system has been criticized for several reasons, including that it encourages numerous filings of narrow claims that build incrementally on fundamental technologies developed by domestic and foreign inventors. Stated in different terms, the system was designed to promo...

This paper surveys the empirical evidence on the link between innovation and economic growth. It considers a number of different measures of innovation, such as R&D spending, patenting, and innovation counts, as well as the pervasive effect of technological spillovers between firms, industries, and countries. There are three main conclusions. The first is that innovation makes a significant con...

There is an emerging consensus among macro-economists that differences in technology across countries account for the major differences in per-capita GDP and the wages of workers with similar skills across countries. Accounting for differences in technology levels across countries thus can go a long way towards understanding global inequality. One mechanism by which poorer countries can catch u...

Abstract Although human capital has been recognized as playing important role in spurring productivity growth, its empirical effect remains ambiguous due to the possibility of latent heterogeneity. To reveal impact this driver economic we propose an alternative methodology, robust frontier non parametric location-scale models for accommodating simultaneously problem model specification uncertai...

Suppose that we have two animals that make the same number of strides per minute, but one of them makes larger strides than the other. If the strides of the smaller animal (the prey) have length a, and those of the larger animal (the predator) have length b, it is easy to see that a persistent predator will always be able to catch up with its prey. Let us assume that the prey starts one step ah...

Event detection and analysis with respect to public opinion and sentiment in social media is a broad and well-addressed research topic. However, the characteristics and sheer volume of noisy Twitter messages make this a difficult task. This demonstration paper describes a TWItter event Summarizer and Trend detector (TWIST) system for event detection, visualization, textual description, and geo-...

Longitudinal bone growth is rapid in prenatal and early postnatal life, but then slows with age and eventually ceases. This growth deceleration is caused primarily by a decrease in chondrocyte proliferation, and is associated with other structural, functional, and molecular changes collectively termed growth plate senescence. Current evidence suggests that growth plate senescence occurs because...