This paper aims at quantifying the economic value of knowledge spillovers by exploring information contained in patent citations. We estimate a market valuation equation for semiconductor firms during the 1980s and 1990s, and find an average value in the amount of $0.6 to 1.2 million “R&D-equivalent” dollars for knowledge spillovers embodied in one patent citation. For an average semiconductor ...

The sources of aggregate productivity growth are explored using detailed data for four-digit U.S. manufacturing industries during 1958-96 and a decomposition formula which allows to quantify the contribution of structural change. Labor productivity as well as total factor productivity are considered and the aggregation is performed with either value-added or employment shares. It is shown that ...

This paper studies the impact of a natural resource boom on structural change and real exchange rate dynamics, taking into account the indirect effect that operates through relative sectoral productivity changes. The paper's contribution to the Dutch disease literature is threefold. First, I extend the simple learning by doing productivity specification to include trade barriers and technology ...

This paper provides new evidence on the objectives and determinants of different types of innovations and patents, environmental as opposed to other innovations and patents, and different variants of environmental innovations and patents. We investigate how firm-specific and sector-specific driving forces differ by innovation type. Moreover, we outline the functions that different innovation ty...

In this study, we analyze the e¤ects of a decrease in unskilled labor in China on the direction of innovation in the US by incorporating production o¤shoring into a North-South model of directed technical change. We …nd that if o¤shoring is present (absent) in equilibrium, then a decrease in unskilled labor in the South would lead to skill-biased (unskill-biased) technical change in the North. ...

We estimate productivities at the sector level for 75 countries and 5 decades, and examine how they evolve over time in both developed and developing countries. We find that in both country groups, comparative advantage has become weaker: productivity grew systematically faster in sectors that were initially at the greater comparative disadvantage. The global welfare implications of this phenom...

Using the tools of real-options theory, Farzin, Huisman and Kort (1998) investigate the optimal timing of technology adoption in a model in which there is ongoing technological progress and the "rm's investment decision is irreversible. When the "rm can switch technologies n(R times, Farzin et al. (1998) obtain the surprising result that the criterion for adopting a new technology derived from ...

This paper uses matching techniques to examine the impact of internet use on individual earnings in six Latin American countries using recent household surveys data. Given their different internet use patterns and their implications, the analysis is done for salaried and self-employed workers separately. While salaried workers users mainly access the internet at work, self employed users access...

We study the impact of incentive pay, local development objectives and government constraints on university licensing performance. We develop and test a simple contracting model of technology licensing offices, using new survey information together with panel data on U.S. universities for 1995-99. We find that private universities are much more likely to adopt incentive pay than public ones, bu...

We examine variation in the concentration of inventive activity across 72 of North America’s most highly innovative locations. In 12 of these areas, innovation is particularly concentrated in a single large firm; we refer to such locations as “company towns.” We find that inventors employed by large firms in these locations tend to draw disproportionately from their firm’s own prior inventions ...