Search results for ""author william j. baumol""

Entrepreneurs are widely recognized for the vital contributions they make to economic growth and general welfare, yet until fairly recently entrepreneurship was not considered worthy of serious economic study. Today, progress has been made to integrate entrepreneurship into macroeconomics, but until now the entrepreneur has been almost completely excluded from microeconomics and standard theoretical models of the firm. The Microtheory of Innovative Entrepreneurship provides the framework for introducing entrepreneurship into mainstream microtheory and incorporating the activities of entrepreneurs, inventors, and managers into standard models of the firm. William Baumol distinguishes between the innovative entrepreneur, who comes up with new ideas and puts them into practice, and the replicative entrepreneur, which can be anyone who launches a new business venture, regardless of whether similar ventures already exist. Baumol puts forward a quasi-formal theoretical analysis of the innovative entrepreneur's influential role in economic life. In doing so, he opens the way to bringing innovative entrepreneurship into the accepted body of mainstream microeconomics, and offers valuable insights that can be used to design more effective policies. The Microtheory of Innovative Entrepreneurship lays the foundation for a new kind of microtheory that reflects the innovative entrepreneur's importance to economic growth and prosperity.

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This compendium of essays brings together some of William Baumol's most distinguished and acclaimed papers with some that are more rare, including a discussion of the growth and innovation mechanism that accounts for the unprecedented growth performance of the market economies. Amongst many other papers of note are a discussion of appropriate regulatory principles for privatized and deregulated firms, and a survey of the accomplishments of economists in the past century and the past millennium. This collection includes the following essays: Productivity Growth, Convergence and Welfare: What the Long-Run Data Show On the Possibility of Continuing Expansion of Finite Resources Social Wants and Dismal Science: The Curious Case of the Climbing Costs of Health and Teaching Towards Microeconomics of Innovation: Growth Engine Hallmark of Market Economics Use of Antitrust to Subvert Competition Predation and the Logic of the Average Variable Cost Test. The papers engage with an eclectic range of issues and represent a vignette of the author's varied contributions to the economic literature.

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Why has capitalism produced economic growth that so vastly dwarfs the growth record of other economic systems, past and present? Why have living standards in countries from America to Germany to Japan risen exponentially over the past century? William Baumol rejects the conventional view that capitalism benefits society through price competition--that is, products and services become less costly as firms vie for consumers. Where most others have seen this as the driving force behind growth, he sees something different--a compound of systematic innovation activity within the firm, an arms race in which no firm in an innovating industry dares to fall behind the others in new products and processes, and inter-firm collaboration in the creation and use of innovations. While giving price competition due credit, Baumol stresses that large firms use innovation as a prime competitive weapon. However, as he explains it, firms do not wish to risk too much innovation, because it is costly, and can be made obsolete by rival innovation. So firms have split the difference through the sale of technology licenses and participation in technology-sharing compacts that pay huge dividends to the economy as a whole--and thereby made innovation a routine feature of economic life. This process, in Baumol's view, accounts for the unparalleled growth of modern capitalist economies. Drawing on extensive research and years of consulting work for many large global firms, Baumol shows in this original work that the capitalist growth process, at least in societies where the rule of law prevails, comes far closer to the requirements of economic efficiency than is typically understood. Resounding with rare intellectual force, this book marks a milestone in the comprehension of the accomplishments of our free-market economic system--a new understanding that, suggests the author, promises to benefit many countries that lack the advantages of this immense innovation machine.

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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 work--and what policies most encourage their growth. The contributors take as their starting point William J. Baumol's 2002 book The Free-Market Innovation Machine (Princeton), which argued that independent entrepreneurs are far more important to growth than economists have traditionally thought, and that an implicit partnership between such entrepreneurs and large corporations is critical to the success of market economies. The contributors include the editors and Robert M. Solow, Kenneth J. Arrow, Michael M. Weinstein, Douglass C. North, Barry R. Weingast, Ying Lowrey, Nathan Rosenberg, Melissa A. Schilling, Corey Phelps, Sylvia Nasar, Boyan Jovanovic, Peter L. Rousseau, Edward N. Wolff, Deepak Somaya, David J. Teece, Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Kenneth L. Sokoloff, Yochanan Shachmurove, Ralph E. Gomory, Jonathan Eaton, Samuel S. Kortum, Alan S. Blinder, Robert J. Shiller, Burton G. Malkiel, and Edmund S. Phelps.

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This major three-volume work contains key papers which reflect the innovation and imagination that has characterised the field of welfare economics during the last 50 years. The selections range from literary treatments to the most advanced mathematical presentation. However, all readers, regardless of their mathematical sophistication or methodological predilections, will find a large number of the papers interesting and worthwhile in giving an overview of the present state of welfare economics and providing guides to the literature specialities of particular interest.

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Why are the costs of health care and higher education rising so dramatically? How can we keep them affordable for lower- and middle-income American families? The exploding cost of health care in the United States is a source of widespread alarm. Similarly, the upward spiral of college tuition fees is cause for serious concern. In this concise and illuminating book, the well-known economist William J. Baumol explores the causes of these seemingly intractable problems and offers a surprisingly simple explanation. Baumol identifies the "cost disease" as a major source of rapidly rising costs in service sectors of the economy. Once we understand that disease, he explains, effective responses become apparent.Baumol presents his analysis with characteristic clarity, tracing the fast-rising prices of health care and education in the United States and other major industrial nations, then examining the underlying causes, which have to do with the nature of providing labor-intensive services. The news is good, Baumol reassures us, because the nature of the disease is such that society will be able to afford the rising costs.

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