Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen, Michael A. WebbEconomics宏观经济学FT50

American Economic Review2020-03-31Stanford University; Barcelona School of Economics; London School of Economics and Political ScienceDOI

Citations920

Influential71

References108

Semantic Scholar

Long-run growth in many models is the product of two terms: the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present evidence from various industries, products, and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply. A good example is Moore’s Law. The number of researchers required today to achieve the famous doubling of computer chip density is more than 18 times larger than the number required in the early 1970s. More generally, everywhere we look we find that ideas, and the exponential growth they imply, are getting harder to find. (JEL D24, E23, O31, O47)

ProductivityEconomicsProduct (mathematics)EconometricsClassical economicsMacroeconomicsMathematicsEconomic Growth and ProductivityFirm Innovation and GrowthInnovation Diffusion and Forecasting