How much credit can be given to entrepreneurship for the unprecedented innovation and growth of free-enterprise economies? In this book, some of the world's leading economists tackle this difficult and understudied question, and their responses shed new light on how free-market economies...

Neither neoclassical nor Keynesian economics displays much patience with the popular notion that technical progress of the labor-saving variety tends to swell the ranks of the unemployed. Those who believe that market forces tend automatically to bring the economy back, if not to "full...

Why does a dynamic growing economy have a persistent long-term unemployment problem? Research Associates Baumol and Wolff have isolated one cause. Although technological change, the engine of growth and economic progress, may not affect or may even increase the total number of jobs available,...

The mean duration of unemployment has approximately doubled in the U.S. between the early 1950s and the mid-1990s, with most of the increase occurring since the early 1970s. We first construct a simple model linking the average duration of unemployment with the speed of technical change. Using...

"Observations, such as the many celebrated inventive entrepreneurs with minimal schooling, lead to the hypothesis that protracted and rigorous education can impede entrepreneurship. Systematic analysis of biographies of noted inventors and entrepreneurs appears not to support the hypothesis. We...

Why does a dynamic growing economy have a persistent long-term unemployment problem? Research Associates William J. Baumol and Edward N. Wolff have isolated one cause. Although technological change, the engine of growth and economic progress, may not affect or may even increase the total number...

[eng] An illustrative disequilibrium model of productivity growth is used to show that neither bounded rationality nor disequilibrium at the micro level is necessary for the economy as a whole to be in a continuing state of disequilibrium. The model shows how the interac­tion of productivity...