Does trade improve institutions and contribute to long run growth? I develop a theory of trade, in which trade liberalization provides incentive to change institutions in two ways. On the one hand, trade leads to specialization according to comparative advantage, expanding the industries that do...

In this paper, we aim at re-assessing the undisputed positive relationship between innovation and economic growth by questioning the view that R&D (and formal knowledge in general) equates innovation and innovation equates regional growth. We rather propose that these linkages are strongly...