Recent research has shown that industries that locate together in space also move together over the business cycle, and that this correspondence between spatial and temporal comovement is important to aggregate volatility. This paper asks whether this correspondence is due to local common shocks...

The real business cycle literature has largely ignored the empirical question of what role technology shocks actually play in business cycles. The observed procyclicality of total factor productivity (TFP) does not prove that technology shocks are important to business cycles, since demand...

This paper asks whether parental income per se has a positive impact on children's human capital accumulation. Previous research has established that income is positively correlated across generations. This does not prove that parents' money matters, however, since income is presumably...

Short-run interindustry comovement may be due either to common shocks or to complementarities that propagate shocks across sectors. This paper assesses the importance of input-output linkages, aggregate activity spillovers, and local activity spillovers to comovement in postwar US manufacturing....

The paper investigates whether patent fees are an effective mechanism to deter the filing of low-quality patent applications. The study analyzes the effect of the Patent Law Amendment Act of 1982, which resulted in a substantial increase in patenting fees at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office,...

Neoclassical economic theory predicts that policies that discourage the consumption of a particular good will induce innovation in a socially desirable substitute. Evolutionary theory emphasizes the possibility of innovation waves associated with the identification of new dominant designs. We...

The pace of industrial innovation and growth is shaped by many forces that interact in complicated ways. Profit-maximizing firms pursue new ideas to obtain market power, but the pursuit of the same goal by other means that even successful inventions art eventually superseded by others; this...

Studies of firm-level data have shown that a firm's R&D and the R&D of other firms increase conventional factor productivity. We investigate these phenomena further by examining the relationship between plant-level productivity and firm-level R&D. We find that (1) the productivity-enhancing...

Within the field of environmental economics, the role of technological change has received much attention. The long-term nature of many environmental problems, such as climate change, makes understanding the evolution of technology an important part of projecting future impacts. Moreover, in...

We explore the commercialization of government-generated technology by analyzing patents awarded to the U.S. government and the citations to those patents from subsequent patents. We use information on citations to federal patents in two ways: (1) to compare the average technological impact of...