American Economic Review Vol. 110 No. 4 2020

Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

Nicholas Bloom¹; Charles I. Jones²; John Van Reenen³; Michael A. Webb⁴

¹ Department of Economics, Stanford University, and NBER (email: ) · ² Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, and NBER (email: ) · ³ Department of Economics, MIT, LSE, and NBER (email: ) · ⁴ Department of Economics, Stanford University (email: )

Abstract

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.

DOI

10.1257/aer.20180338

Volume

110

Issue

4

Pages

1104-1144

Language

en

Sources

bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

Cite

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