Showing 1 - 10 of 451
On average, the poor European periphery converged on the rich industrial core in the four or five decades prior to World War I. Some, like the three Scandinavian economies, used industrialization to achieve a spectacular convergence on the leaders, especially in real wages and living standards....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005124320
Why did substantial parts of Europe abandon the institutionalized churches around 1900? Empirical studies using modern data mostly contradict the traditional view that education was a leading source of the seismic social phenomenon of secularization. We construct a unique panel dataset of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011083914
The interplay between religion and the economy has occupied social scientists for long. We construct a unique panel of income and Protestant church attendance for six waves of up to 175 Prussian counties spanning 1886-1911. The data reveal a marked decline in church attendance coinciding with...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011084066
We model the effect of Protestant vs. Catholic denomination in an economic theory of suicide, accounting for differences in religious-community integration, views about man’s impact on God’s grace, and the possibility of confessing sins. We test the theory using a unique micro-regional...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009147410
We use spatial regression discontinuity analysis to test whether the historical partition of Poland among three empires—Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Prussia—has a persistent effect on political outcomes in contemporary Poland and to examine the channels of this influence. We find that the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011083639
This paper argues that an economy's transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern growth requires markets to reach a critical size, and competition to reach a critical level of intensity. By allowing an economy to produce a greater variety of goods, a larger market makes goods more...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005041097
Patent holders may choose to protect innovations with single patents or to develop portfolios of multiple, related inventions. We propose a simple decision-making model in which patent-holders may allocate resources to either expanding the number of related patents or investing in higher value...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011083853
A large portion of innovators do not patent their inventions. This is a relative puzzle since innovators are often perceived to be at the mercy of imitators in the absence of legal protection. In practice, innovators however invest actively in making their products technologically hard to...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011084053
This paper studies how patent rights and price regulation affect how fast new drugs are launched in different countries, using newly constructed data on launches of 642 new drugs in 76 countries for the period 1983-2002, and information on the duration and content of patent and price control...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011084584
We construct a competitive model of innovation and growth under constant returns to scale. Previous models of growth under constant returns cannot model technological innovation. Current models of endogenous innovation rely on the interplay between increasing returns and monopolistic markets. In...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005661529