This paper uses the adoption and invention of the spinning jenny as a test case to understand why the industrial revolution occurred in Britain in the eighteenth century rather than in France or India. It is shown that wages were much higher relative to capital prices in Britain than in other countries. Calculation of the profitability of adopting the spinning jenny shows that it was profitable...

This paper builds a two-country, two-sector (polluting, nonpolluting) trade model with directed technical change, examining whether unilateral environmental policies can ensure sustainable growth. The polluting good generates more or less emissions depending on its relative use of a clean and a dirty input. I show that a unilateral policy combining clean research subsidies and a trade tax can e...

This paper studies the implications for the long-run world income distribution (WID) of two possible knowledge spillovers structures: appropriate technology and backward knowledge spillovers. In an appropriate technology framework, where total factor intensity is an index of the technological level of an economy, countries will grab useful knowledge only from their technological neighborhood, t...

This paper provides new evidence on the objectives and determinants of different types of innovations and patents, environmental as opposed to other innovations and patents, and different variants of environmental innovations and patents. We investigate how firm-specific and sector-specific driving forces differ by innovation type. Moreover, we outline the functions that different innovation ty...

a r t i c l e i n f o Available online xxxx JEL classifications: O33 O34 O41 Keywords: Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Economic growth North–south model In this paper, we develop a general equilibrium endogenous growth model that emphasizes the IPR enforcement effects on growth, in a scenario of north–south technological knowledge diffusion. The economy consists of three sectors, and firms a...

When should a buyer of an exhaustible resource move to a substitute if only the seller knows the exact size of the remaining resource stock? We characterize stationary dynamic signalling equilibrium of this Coasian bargaining problem, and find that adjustment delays in ending the relationship and the degree of asymmetric information shape the equilibrium outcome. The Coase conjecture —the infor...

This paper analyzes the impact of the skill composition of the working labor force on the innovative activity of firms when there is both an imperfect labor market and monopolistic competition on the product market. The labor market imperfections arise through a kind of insider outsider mechanism where in the bargaining round the union attaches a greater weight to the wage and employment intere...

This paper analyzes the behavior of monopoly firm serving its products to two countries. The main focus of this paper is on how the product-quality choice in different markets are related with the cost structure of the firm. First, This paper examines the effects of production and R&D costs on the product quality separately, and then discusses the general case where the both costs exists. This ...

The paper investigates the differences between small, medium-sized and large firms regarding their performance in the introduction of new products and processes. After a review of the relevant literature, two models are proposed and tested in search for different business strategies and innovation inputs connected to product and process innovations. The empirical analysis uses innovation survey...

We estimate hurdle rates for firms’ investments in pollution abatement technology, using ex post data. The method is based on a structural option value model where the future price of polluting fuel is the major source of uncertainty facing the firm. The empirical procedure is illustrated using a panel of firms from the Swedish pulp and paper industry, and the energy and heating sector, and the...