Can a country grow faster by saving more? We address this question both theoretically and empirically. In our theoretical model, growth results from innovations that allow local sectors to catch up with frontier technology. In poor countries, catching up requires the cooperation of a foreign...

We develop a model in which innovations in an economy's growth potential are an important driving force of the business cycle. The framework shares the emphasis of the recent "new shock" literature on revisions of beliefs about the future as a source of fluctuations, but differs by tieing these...

We examine the extent to which financial market development impacts the diffusion of 16 major technologies, looking across 55 countries, from 1870 to 2000. We find that greater depth in financial markets leads to faster technology diffusion for more capital-intensive technologies, but only in...

We present a tractable model for analyzing the relationship between economic growth and the intensive and extensive margins of technology adoption. The "extensive" margin refers to the timing of a country's adoption of a new technology; the "intensive" margin refers to how many units are adopted...

We develop a model that, at the aggregate level, is similar to the one sector neoclassical growth model, while, at the disaggregate level, has implications for the path of observable measures of technology adoption. We estimate our model using data on the diffusion of 15 technologies in 166...

This note accompanies the Cross?country Historical Adoption of Technology (CHAT) dataset. CHAT is an unbalanced panel dataset with information on the adoption of over 100 technologies in more than 150 countries since 1800. The data is available for download at: http://www.nber.org/data/chat. We...

We examine the diffusion of more than twenty technologies across twenty-three of the world's leading industrial economies. Our evidence covers major technology classes such as textile production, steel manufacture, communications, information technology, transportation, and electricity for the...

We introduce a growth model of technology diffusion and endogenous Total Factor Productivity (TFP) levels both at the sector and aggregate level. At the aggregate, the model behaves as the Neoclassical growth model. Our goal is for this model to bridge the gap between the theoretical and...

We develop and estimate a model where technology diffusion depends on the level of productivity embodied in capital and where this is, in turn, determined by two key mechanisms: the rate at which the quality embodied in new technology vintages increases (embodiment) and the gains from varieties...

This paper explores whether lobbies slow down technology diffusion. To answer this question, we exploit the differential effect of various institutional attributes that should affect the costs of erecting barriers when the new technology has a technologically close predecessor but not otherwise....