Peter Funk

Induced Innovation Revisited

This paper studies the joint evolution of factor prices, factor shares and the type of technical progress. Its main aim is to give a microeconomic foundation to the Hypothesis of Induced Innovation of the earlier literature, which assumes that the type of progress at any moment of time is chosen so as to maximize the current rate of output growth. An important conclusion of the Hypothesis of Induced Innovation is that in the long run factor-augmenting technical progress takes the form of pure labour augmentation. Copyright 2002 by The London School of Economics and Political Science

Inflation and Innovation-driven Growth

This paper analyzes the interaction between inflation and the long-run levels of employment and output growth in a Schumpeterian growth model with quality improving innovations under nominal price rigidity. At the unique REE steady state equilibrium, both employment and growth are hump-shaped functions of money growth peaking at positive inflation rates.

Auctions with interdependent valuations

This paper analyses auctions in which the valuation of each player not only depends on whether he wins or not, but also on who is the winner if it is not him.

Satiation and Underdevelopment

In this article we show how absolute poverty and per capita growth can be sustained simultaneously in a fully integrated world economy even in the absence of population growth. In contrast to the literature we use a model of endogenously sustained growth in which not only the intensity of progress is determined endogenously, but also the direction of change. The essential assumptions driving the results are that once a person has satisfied his basic needs, he prefers high-quality commodities to low-quality commodites and that innovation-possibilities within high-quality sectors are not unskilled labor-using.

Induced innovation: an empirical test

A method is developed to empirically test the hypothesis of induced innovation as it has been specified and used in the theoretical literature. A strong and a weak version of the hypothesis is tested using sectorial data from the USA, Canada, Germany, France and the UK. The strong version tests for the exact dependency of the relation between the change in factor-productivities on the one hand and relative prices and actual factor-productivities on the other hand. The weak version only tests for the direction of this dependency. In all countries the weak hypothesis is accepted in all sectors except in ‘electricity, gas, and water’. The strong hypothesis is accepted in about half of all sectors. It is rejected only in sectors, in which the degree to which progress is intentional is low.

Entry and growth in a perfectly competitive vintage model

Abstract A perfectly competitive vintage-knowledge model of Schumpeterian growth is introduced to study the relation between growth, technology-lifetime, entry, and productivity-dispersion. The incentive to innovate is generated by the productivity-dispersion (latent in traditional vintage models) between new and old plants, rather than by monopoly rents. The model has a unique steady-state REE with endogenous growth. The endogenous extent of entry constitutes a buffer, dampening the effect of research-efficiency and completely neutralizing the effect of population size or population growth rates on per-capita income levels and growth rates. Variations of research-efficiency lead to a negative relation between growth and vintage-lifetime and a non-monotonic relation between growth and productivity-dispersion.