Climate change must deal with two market failures: global warming and learning by doing in renewable use. The first-best policy consists of an aggressive renewables subsidy in the near term and a gradually rising and falling carbon tax. Given that global carbon taxes remain elusive, policy...

Kenneth J. Arrow's 1962 article “The Economic Implications of Learning by Doing” is considered as a seminal contribution in endogenous growth theory. However, no history of its origins has been written yet. We aim to fill this gap by studying the genesis of Arrow's article, showing how its...

This paper proposes a theory of liquidity dynamics. Illiquidity results from asymmetric information. Observing the historical track record teaches agents how to interpret public information and helps overcome information asymmetry. There can be an illiquidity trap: too much asymmetric...

In this paper, we consider a model of on-the-job learning where workers learn informally by watching and imitating colleagues. We estimate the rate of knowledge diffusion inside the firm using two matched worker-firm data sets from Morocco and Senegal. We rely on non-linear least squares to...

The term "network effects" has a clear meaning in economics but non-economists often confuse it with other concepts such as increasing returns to scale and learning-by-doing. This essay is an attempt to clear up some of this confusion

In this paper we develop the first model to incorporate the dynamic productivity consequences of both the spending effect and the resource movement effect of oil abundance. We show that doing so dramatically alters the conclusions drawn from earlier models of learning by doing (LBD) and the...