We document that the Bay Area rose from 4% of all successful US patent applications in 1976 to 16% in 2008. This is partly driven by the increase in the prevalence of information and communication technology; however, even for patents unrelated to information and communication technology, we see a disproportionate increase in the share of all US patents from the Bay Area. We interpret this to s...

Article history: Received 10 September 2012 Received in revised form 19 March 2013 Accepted 5 April 2013 Available online xxxx This paper analyzes firms' decisions to seek intellectual property rights in global markets, particularly in China.We introduce the notion of a ‘quadic patent,’ defined as a patent family that consists of patent applications filed at the European Patent Office, the Japa...

We build a general equilibrium model of occupation choice, where the risks inherent in a technology embodying a new innovation are only vaguely known (ambiguous), whereas the old technology has known risks. Using the Arrow-Hurwicz criterion to characterise decisionmaking in the face of ambiguity, we distinguish agents according to their degree of ambiguity aversion. Equilibrium requires that al...

Ž . Building on evidence that a productivity growth from learning by doing diminŽ . ishes as experience accumulates with a technology and b learning by doing is largely specific to each production technology, this paper models a firm’s decision of when to update its technology. The model implies that technology updates endogenously bring large drops in productivity. The model also implies that ...

Ever since its introduction in the 1990s, the systems of innovations (SI) concept has received a great deal of attention from researchers and politicians. The systems of innovation policy (SIP) approach, which is based on the SI concept, is considered an alternative to neoclassical theory. Its goal is to provide new rationales and criteria for innovation policy, as well as concrete implications...

This paper presents a micro-model of knowledge creation and transfer for a couple. Our model incorporates two key aspects of the cooperative process of knowledge creation: (i) heterogeneity of people in their state of knowledge is essential for successful cooperation in the joint creation of new ideas, while (ii) the very process of cooperative knowledge creation a¤ects the heterogeneity of peo...

This paper studies the transitional dynamics in a quality ladder model of endogenous growth in which North-South trade leads to technological diffusion through reverse engineering of intermediate goods. The concept of learning-to-learn is incorporated into both imitative and innovative processes, which in turn drive domestic technological progress. International trade with imitation leads to fe...

We analyze the effect of patenting on R&D with a model linking a firm’s R&D effort with its decision to patent, recognizing that R&D and patenting affect one another and are both driven by many of the same factors. Using survey data for the U.S. manufacturing sector, we estimate the increment to the value of an innovation realized by patenting it, and then analyze the effect on R&D of changing ...

This paper argues that technical change in the East Asian countries was sector-specific, took the form of learning-by-doing and was induced by relative factor prices. Usual growth accounting exercises do not account for this in the structure of the assumed aggregate production function and therefore miss these technical gains. Assumed or estimated elasticities of substitution are too high in th...

In the EU, most large firms use e-business applications, such as enterprise resource planning and online procurement. Based on e-business watch data for EU-4 (Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom) we find that the actual use of enterprise resource planning and online procurement is positively correlated with labour productivity growth. Furthermore, we find that certain e-business appli...