We model core demands for better governance (political, economic and institutional), more employment and less consumer price inflation using a methodological innovation on the complete elimination of cross-country differences in signals susceptible of sparking social revolts. The empirical evidence based on 14 MENA countries show that the Arab Spring was predictable in 2007 to occur between Jan...

We investigate whether foreign institutional ownership impacts corporate innovation. Using firm-level data from 30 countries in 2001-2010, we find that higher foreign institutional ownership is associated with more investment in R&D and patents. Using the exogenous increase in foreign institutional holdings that follows a firm’s addition to the Morgan Stanley Capital International World Index, ...

An Empirical Model of Growth Through Product Innovation Productivity dispersion across firms is large and persistent, and worker reallocation among firms is an important source of productivity growth. The purpose of the paper is to estimate the structure of an equilibrium model of growth through innovation that explains these facts. The model is a modified version of the Schumpeterian theory of...

Wages and Productivity Growth in a Dynamic Monopoly* This Paper studies the intertemporal problem of a monopolistic firm that engages in productivity-enhancing innovations to reduce its labour costs. If the level of wages is sufficiently low, the firm’s rate of productivity growth approaches the rate of wage growth and eventually the firm reaches a steady state where its unit labour cost remain...

How does technological progress occur? Is the nature of innovation stable over time? We shed new light on these questions through a mixture of empirics and theory. We begin with an empirical analysis of patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Offi ce. This analysis reveals several striking facts that emphasize the increasing importance of novel combinations of technologies for...

We consider patent licensing under a simple model of asymmetric information, where an outsider innovator of a cost-reducing innovation interacts with a monopolist, whose cost is private information. When the innovator is endowed with combinations of fixed fee and royalty, in any optimal menu, the low-cost monopolist is always offered a pure fixed fee contract, while for the contract offered to ...

The literature on R&D contests implicitly assumes that contestants submit their innovation regardless of its value. This ignores a potential adverse selection problem. The present paper analyzes the procurement of innovations when the procurer cannot commit to never bargain with innovators who bypass the contest. We compare fixed-prize tournaments with and without entry fees, and optimal scorin...

We introduce non-homothetic preferences into an R&D based growth model to study how demand forces hape the impact of inequality on innovation and growth. Inequality affects the incentive to innovate via a price effect and a market size effect. When innovators have a large productivity advantage over traditional producers a higher extent of inequality tends to increase innovators’prices and mark...

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the short-term interest-rate dynamics based on three different data sets and two flexible parametric specifications. The significance of nonlinearity in the short-rate drift declines with increasing maturity for the interest-rate series used in the study. Using a flexible diffusion specification and incorporating GARCH volatility and non-normal in...

Investment in R&D encourages innovation, which in turn, spurs economic growth. This paper presents a model to test whether that the number of patent applications is dependent on R&D expenditure, especially R&D expenditure in the business sector. This paper shows: 1) that a strong positive correlation exists between R&D expenditure and patent applications, 2) that R&D investment creates patent a...