EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Substitution and Complementarity in Endogenous Innovation

Alwyn Young

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1993, vol. 108, issue 3, 775-807

Abstract: The influence of Schumpeter's notion of "creative destruction" may have led to an overemphasis on substitution between technologies in recent models of endogenous innovation. Historical examples of technological change suggest that new technologies may just as frequently complement older technologies, creating, rather than destroying, rents. Acknowledgment of the potential for both substitution and complementarity among inventions allows for a much richer characterization of the growth process, creating the possibility of threshold effects and multiple equilibria and bringing to the forefront the important role played by the expectations of inventive entrepreneurs.

Date: 1993
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (56)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.2307/2118408 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:108:y:1993:i:3:p:775-807.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:108:y:1993:i:3:p:775-807.