Nanotechnologies are expected to be the dominant general purpose technology of the next decades. Their market potential is immense and especially demand side arguments will have far reaching consequences for innovations. They may occur as increased miniaturization or via building completely new...

This paper analyzes a stylized model of international capital mobility and diffusion of embodied technologies from North to South. The South can fall behind in terms of technologies or get trapped in a situation, in which it is unable to attract foreign capital and embodied technologies, if its...

The paper aims to investigate the diffusion process of two competing innovative technologies in the health care sector. Novelties in cardiovascular surgery will serve as an example. Using a rather simple modeling approach for the decisions of adopters and suppliers we simulate the evolution of a...

In this paper we highlight the importance of technology flows between sec- tors and their impact on the labor productivity of large-scale corporations. Based on theoretical considerations, we explore technological spillovers between the sectors of an economy. Large-scale corporations usually...

The theory of endogenous technical change has deeply contributed to our understanding of the fundamental sources of economic growth and development. In this chapter we survey important contributions in the field by focussing on the basic structure of endogenous growth models with horizontal as...

This paper develops a new open-economy endogenous growth model where technology diffusion allows for a stable and non-degenerate world income distribution. In accordance with the empirical literature, I find that country characteristics such as the social infrastructure, the degree of openness,...

While the economic theory predicts that developing countries will gain the most from technology spillovers, there have been only a few analyses looking at this question empirically. The present study focuses on a panel of 27 transition and 20 Western European countries between 1990 and 2006 and...

We investigate the controversial issue whether unemployment is related to productivity growth in the long run, using U.S. data in a framework of infrequent mean shifts. Tests find (endogenously dated) shifts around 1974, 1986, and 1996, system techniques indicate that the shifts are common...

This paper tests the hypothesis that industrial process innovations diffuse more slowly in developing countries than in industrialized countries. The focus of the analysis is on four innovations in the textile and steel industries, selected according to data availability. The analysis uses a...