This paper seeks to analyze the nature of the terrorist threat following 9/11, and to explore the implications for defense R&D policy. First it reviews the defining trends of defense R&D since the cold war, and brings in pertinent empirical evidence: The US accumulated during the 1990s a defense...

The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of R&D policy in Israel, and critically examine the policies currently in place as well as proposals to change them. We review in Part I the various programs of the Office of the Chief Scientist (OCS) of the Ministry of Industry and Trade in...

The israeli high tech sector is widely regarded as a hotbed of cutting-edge technologies, and as the growth engine of the israeli economy in the nineties and beyond. In this paper we present a close-up portrait of innovation in Israel for the past 30 years, with the aid of highly detailed patent...

The goal of this paper is to address the problem of 'product innovations' (i.e. new goods. increased variety, and quality change) in the construction of price indices and, by extension, in the measurement of economic performance. The premise is that a great deal of technical progress takes the...

The goal is to tackle anew the main problems encountered in using patent data in economic research, namely, the large variance in the value of patents, and the difficulties in matching patents with economic categories. The first is addressed with the aid of patent citations, the second with...

The main goal of this paper is to put forward a methodology for the measurement of product innovations using a value metric, i.e., equating the "magnitude" of innovations with the welfare gains that they generate. This research design is applied to the case of Computed Tomography (CT) Scanners,...

History suggests that dismal prophecies regarding the impact of great technological advances rarely come to pass. Yet, as many occupations will indeed vanish with the advent of AI as the new General Purpose Technology (GPT), we should search for ways to ameliorate the detrimental effects of AI,...

This paper asks the question: Can we see evidence of General Purpose Technologies in patent data? Using data on three million US patents granted between 1967 and 1999, and their citations received between 1975 and 2002, we construct a number of measures of GPTs, including generality, number of...

The goal of this paper is to lay out a methodology and corresponding computer algorithms, that allow us to extract the detailed data on inventors contained in patents, and harness it for economic research. Patent data has long been used in empirical research in economics, and yet the information...

This paper describes the database on U.S. patents that we have developed over the past decade, with the goal of making it widely accessible for research. We present main trends in U. S. patenting over the last 30 years, including a variety of original measures constructed with citation data,...