Samuel Kortum
Biographic Data
| ID | 976971 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Samuel Kortum |
| GIVEN NAMES | Samuel |
| FAMILY NAME | Kortum |
| SIGNATURE | KORTUM S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Minnesota |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 26 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations
I was honored that Lee Alston asked me to be the convener for the Nevins Prize Competition this year. There were close to a dozen submissions spanning a
On Deficits and Unemployment
Entre 2007 et 2011 le chômage s’est accru notablement dans la plupart des pays européens. Durant la même période, les déficits extérieurs de nombreux pays européens se sont fortement réduits. Nous utilisons un modèle d’équilibre général, de type ricardien et reposant sur des rigidités salariales, couvrant trente-quatre pays, pour analyser la relation entre les ajustements extérieurs, les pnb relatifs et le chômage durant cette période. Notre anal…
Putting Ricardo to Work
David Ricardo (1817) provided a mathematical example showing that countries could gain from trade by exploiting innate differences in their ability to make different goods. In the basic Ricardian example, two countries do better by specializing in different goods and exchanging them for each other, even when one country is better at making both. This example typically gets presented in the first or second chapter of a text on international trade,…
Dissecting Trade: Firms, Industries, and Export Destinations
We examine the entry behavior of producers in different industries in different ex-port markets using a comprehensive dataset of French firms. These data reveal enormous heterogeneity, primarily within industries, in the nature of entry into different markets. Nonetheless, some striking regularities appear both across and within industries. The French data add a new dimension to an emerging empirical literature examining international trade at th…
Innovating Firms and Aggregate Innovation
We develop a parsimonious model of innovation to confront firm‐level evidence. It captures the dynamics of individual heterogeneous firms, describes the behavior of an industry with firm entry and exit, and delivers a general equilibrium model of technological change. While unifying the theoretical analysis of firms, industries, and the aggregate economy, the model yields insights into empirical work on innovating firms. It accounts for the persi…
Plants and Productivity in International Trade
We reconcile trade theory with plant-level export behavior, extending the Ricardian model to accommodate many countries, geographic barriers, and imperfect competition. Our model captures qualitatively basic facts about U.S. plants: (i) productivity dispersion, (ii) higher productivity among exporters, (iii) the small fraction who export, (iv) the small fraction earned from exports among exporting plants, and (v) the size advantage of exporters. …
Technology, Geography, and Trade
We develop a Ricardian trade model that incorporates realistic geographic features into general equilibrium. It delivers simple structural equations for bilateral trade with parameters relating to absolute advantage, to comparative advantage (promoting trade), and to geographic barriers (resisting it). We estimate the parameters with data on bilateral trade in manufactures, prices, and geography from 19 OECD countries in 1990. We use the model to…
Assessing the Contribution of Venture Capital to Innovation
We examine the influence of venture capital on patented inventions in the United States across twenty industries over three decades. We address concerns about causality in several ways, including exploiting a 1979 policy shift that spurred venture capital fundraising. We find that increases in venture capital activity in an industry are associated with significantly higher patenting rates. While the ratio of venture capital to R&D averaged less t…
International Technology Diffusion: Theory and Measurement
We model the invention of new technologies and their diffusion across countries. In our model all countries grow at the same steady‐state rate, with each country's productivity ranking determined by how rapidly it adopts ideas. Research effort is determined by how much ideas earn at home and abroad. Patents affect the return to ideas. We relate the decision to patent an invention internationally to the cost of patenting in a country and to the ex…
Research, Patenting, and Technological Change
This paper develops a search-theoretic model of technological change to explain why both patenting and the growth of productivity have remained roughly constant while research employment in the United States has increased by a factor of six over the past four decades. In the model, researchers sample from probability distributions determining the efficiency of potential new production techniques. Technological breakthroughs, resulting in patents,…
Trade in ideas Patenting and productivity in the OECD
We develop a model of growth and technology diffusion which we fit to aggregate data from OECD countries. Our model implies that each country will eventually grow at the same rate, with its relative productivity determined by its ability to adopt new inventions. Hence productivity levels rather than growth rates better reflect a country's ability to innovate or to adopt new technology. We estimate the model to explain international patterns of pr…
Innovating Firms and Aggregate Innovation
We develop a parsimonious model of innovation to confront firm‐level evidence. It captures the dynamics of individual heterogeneous firms, describes the behavior of an industry with firm entry and exit, and delivers a general equilibrium model of technological change. While unifying the theoretical analysis of firms, industries, and the aggregate economy, the model yields insights into empirical work on innovating firms. It accounts for the persi…
Putting Ricardo to Work
David Ricardo (1817) provided a mathematical example showing that countries could gain from trade by exploiting innate differences in their ability to make different goods. In the basic Ricardian example, two countries do better by specializing in different goods and exchanging them for each other, even when one country is better at making both. This example typically gets presented in the first or second chapter of a text on international trade,…
Trade in ideas Patenting and productivity in the OECD
We develop a model of growth and technology diffusion which we fit to aggregate data from OECD countries. Our model implies that each country will eventually grow at the same rate, with its relative productivity determined by its ability to adopt new inventions. Hence productivity levels rather than growth rates better reflect a country's ability to innovate or to adopt new technology. We estimate the model to explain international patterns of pr…
Research, Patenting, and Technological Change
This paper develops a search-theoretic model of technological change to explain why both patenting and the growth of productivity have remained roughly constant while research employment in the United States has increased by a factor of six over the past four decades. In the model, researchers sample from probability distributions determining the efficiency of potential new production techniques. Technological breakthroughs, resulting in patents,…
International Technology Diffusion: Theory and Measurement
We model the invention of new technologies and their diffusion across countries. In our model all countries grow at the same steady‐state rate, with each country's productivity ranking determined by how rapidly it adopts ideas. Research effort is determined by how much ideas earn at home and abroad. Patents affect the return to ideas. We relate the decision to patent an invention internationally to the cost of patenting in a country and to the ex…
Assessing the Contribution of Venture Capital to Innovation
We examine the influence of venture capital on patented inventions in the United States across twenty industries over three decades. We address concerns about causality in several ways, including exploiting a 1979 policy shift that spurred venture capital fundraising. We find that increases in venture capital activity in an industry are associated with significantly higher patenting rates. While the ratio of venture capital to R&D averaged less t…
Technology, Geography, and Trade
We develop a Ricardian trade model that incorporates realistic geographic features into general equilibrium. It delivers simple structural equations for bilateral trade with parameters relating to absolute advantage, to comparative advantage (promoting trade), and to geographic barriers (resisting it). We estimate the parameters with data on bilateral trade in manufactures, prices, and geography from 19 OECD countries in 1990. We use the model to…
Plants and Productivity in International Trade
We reconcile trade theory with plant-level export behavior, extending the Ricardian model to accommodate many countries, geographic barriers, and imperfect competition. Our model captures qualitatively basic facts about U.S. plants: (i) productivity dispersion, (ii) higher productivity among exporters, (iii) the small fraction who export, (iv) the small fraction earned from exports among exporting plants, and (v) the size advantage of exporters. …
Dissecting Trade: Firms, Industries, and Export Destinations
We examine the entry behavior of producers in different industries in different ex-port markets using a comprehensive dataset of French firms. These data reveal enormous heterogeneity, primarily within industries, in the nature of entry into different markets. Nonetheless, some striking regularities appear both across and within industries. The French data add a new dimension to an emerging empirical literature examining international trade at th…
Innovating Firms and Aggregate Innovation
We develop a parsimonious model of innovation to confront firm‐level evidence. It captures the dynamics of individual heterogeneous firms, describes the behavior of an industry with firm entry and exit, and delivers a general equilibrium model of technological change. While unifying the theoretical analysis of firms, industries, and the aggregate economy, the model yields insights into empirical work on innovating firms. It accounts for the persi…
Putting Ricardo to Work
David Ricardo (1817) provided a mathematical example showing that countries could gain from trade by exploiting innate differences in their ability to make different goods. In the basic Ricardian example, two countries do better by specializing in different goods and exchanging them for each other, even when one country is better at making both. This example typically gets presented in the first or second chapter of a text on international trade,…
On Deficits and Unemployment
Entre 2007 et 2011 le chômage s’est accru notablement dans la plupart des pays européens. Durant la même période, les déficits extérieurs de nombreux pays européens se sont fortement réduits. Nous utilisons un modèle d’équilibre général, de type ricardien et reposant sur des rigidités salariales, couvrant trente-quatre pays, pour analyser la relation entre les ajustements extérieurs, les pnb relatifs et le chômage durant cette période. Notre anal…
Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations
I was honored that Lee Alston asked me to be the convener for the Nevins Prize Competition this year. There were close to a dozen submissions spanning a
Economics (9 works) · Economic Growth and Productivity (5 works) · Firm Innovation and Growth (5 works) · International economics (5 works) · International trade (5 works) · Global trade and economics (4 works) · Macroeconomics (4 works) · Productivity (4 works) · Economic geography (3 works) · Geography (3 works)