Peter Thompson

Professor

Telephone: (305) 348 - 6031

Email: peter.thompson2

Home page:  www.fiu.edu/~thompsop

RePEc handle: pth1

PhD: University of Florida, 1993.

Joined the faculty in 2004.

Fields: Growth, technological change, industry evolution.

My research is concerned primarily with the relationship between technological change and economic growth, interests I have pursued along two distinct lines. The first line is the development of theoretical macroeconomic models that shed some light on the relationship between firm-level R&D and aggregate economic growth. The second line of research is involved with microeconometric investigations of technological change. These two lines of research are mutually supporting: the macroeconomic models inform the questions I want to address with microeconomic data; the microeconometric studies suggest new directions for macroeconomic research efforts.

While the macroeconomic models have addressed several applied questions, such as the design of optimal technology policy, the relationship between economic scale and growth, the conditions for convergence in national income levels and the relationship between market structure and aggregate economic growth, I have primarily been concerned with developing a paradigm for thinking about long-run technological change. I have therefore also been concerned with empirical evaluations of these models, using both aggregate and microeconomic data. One challenge has been that diverse macroeconomic models, with distinct implications for policy and for the sort of world we may expect in the future, look very similar when viewed through the coarse lens of modern macroeconomic data. I have consequently turned increasingly to microeconomic and historical data to investigate the nature of long-run technological change. Recent studies have included evaluations of the importance of learning and knowledge spillovers in World War II shipbuilding, the use of patent data to study the geography of knowledge spillovers, tests of models of technology adoption conducted with data on 19th century mariners' wage contracts, and firm survival in the 19th century shipbuilding industry.

Learning by Doing. In Bronwyn Hall and Nathan Rosenberg (eds.) Handbook of Economics of Technical Change, Elsevier/North-Holland. Forthcoming, 2009.

Patent Citations and the Geography of Knowledge Spillovers: A Reassessment [with Melanie Fox Kean], American Economic Review, 95(1): 450-460 (2005).