This manuscript reports on the proceedings of an R&D Roundtable that took place at the National Bureau of Economic Research in the summer of 1999. Zvi Griliches envisioned the Roundtable as a chance to discuss the agenda for economic research on R&D over the next 20 years. Daron Acemoglu,...

An outstanding fact of capitalist change in the last few centuries is the ongoing emergence of new consumption alternatives which accompany income and productivity growth in expanding economies. Far from satiating consumers, exponential economic growth seems to stimulate human desires by...

We consider a modification of the standard two-stage model wherein two high-cost firms conduct cost-reducing R&D, in a setting with spillovers, and then Cournot compete against a low-cost firm that engages in no R&D. Two R&D cooperation scenarios are presented: the R&D cartel and the joint lab....

This paper employs unit root tests that allow for two endogenously determined structural breaks to study whether or not invention activities are converging across US regions/states. Using US patent data from 1929 to 1997, we find technological β-convergence in six of the nine Census regions, in...

Zvi Griliches's contributions to the economics of technology and growth are identified. Included is a discussion of his contributions on: the determinants of differences in speed of adoption of innovations; the use of patents to measure technology; the private and social returns to R&D; and...

In the earlier years of the twentieth century economists were beginning to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of the economic change. Joseph Alois Schumpeter, for example, argued that the first key step in understanding economic change is to think carefully about innovation. When Kuznets...

This paper presents a dynamic feedback model of the technology diffusion process in which each firm's technology adoption decisions maximize the net present value of its anticipated cash flow, taking into account the direct cost savings, the number of linked firms expected to adopt complementary...

Over the past twenty years real wages have stagnated despite substantial technical progress. This runs contrary to the widespread belief that technological change increases real wages. This paper presents a theoretical model showing that technical progress could reduce wages. This hypothesis is...

The purpose of this article is to decompose demand changes for factor input and explore the factor that information technology (IT) capital stock has largely increased in Japan. The Allen partial elasticities of substitution are calculated and the variations in factor input demand are broken...

The concept 'technological opportunity' has been coined to capture the vitality of the underlying sciences and technologies as the sources of technical progress that firms draw upon during innovation. Nonetheless, less attention has been paid to the fact that the commercialisation of technical...