Cristiano Antonelli

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Turin

This paper presents and frames the results of the recent book The creative response: knowledge and innovation by Antonelli and Colombelli (2023). The book combines the advances of the economics of knowledge and innovation, implementing the Schumpeterian notion of creative response to understand the determinants and the effects of the rate and direc...

The new evidence provided by the codification of intangible assets in national accounts and firm statistics provides the opportunity to test the Schumpeterian creative response hypothesis according to which (i) the generation and exploitation of knowledge are characterized by high levels of risk, (ii) firms in equilibrium are reluctant to undertake...

Technological congruence examines the alignment between output elasticity and relative input costs and its effects on the contingent efficiency of new technologies. The introduction of biased technological change is driven by the relative levels of input costs. In capital-abundant countries, the adoption of new capital-intensive (labor-intensive) t...

The existing literature has widely explored the impact of technological change on income inequality. The reverse relationship – from income inequality to innovation – has received considerably less attention. This paper contributes to fill this gap by advancing and testing the hypothesis that higher levels of top-income inequality enhance innovatio...

The limited transferability of knowledge is pivotal to the shaping and defining of the positive effects on total factor productivity of the limited appropriability of knowledge. Access to and use of knowledge spillovers entail relevant absorption costs and exhibit substantial variance across firms, regions, industries, and countries and thus, have...

This Element combines the advances of the economics of knowledge and innovation implementing the Schumpeterian notion of creative response to understand the determinants and the effects of the rate and direction of technological and organizational change and its variance across time and space, firms, and industries. The notion of creative response...

Recent economics of knowledge studies have highlighted the strong positive effects that the limited exhaustibility of knowledge and its cumulability exert on the recombinant generation of new technological knowledge. While existing empirical investigations primarily focus on the knowledge generation and technology production functions, the analysis...

The paper articulates and tests the hypothesis that the current direction of technological change is knowledge- rather than capital intensive. The new accounting procedures that identify and quantify intangible assets allow us to test the role of capitalized knowledge as an input in the technology production function. The micro-level evidence from...

The new knowledge intensive direction of technological change is magnified at the firm level by the limited exhaustibility of knowledge. This limited exhaustibility triggers cumulability and extensibility for which the larger the firm, the lower the knowledge generation costs from using a larger stock of existing knowledge, and the lower the knowle...

The identification of the full range of ingredients of the Schumpeterian dynamics enables to contribute the analytical framework of evolutionary complexity. According to this Schumpeterian perspective, broad societal transformations, as the opening of international trade, can be viewed as the causes and consequences of the Schumpeterian creative re...

This paper links the Smart Specialisation Strategy (S3) with technological congruence, which stems from the coherence of directed technological change with the structural conditions of local factor markets. We argue that complementary to regional branching, technological congruence is a crucial dimension of S3, and that it has powerful effects on t...

In the catch-up literature, more attention has been paid to the rate rather than the direction of technological change. This paper presents and implements a novel methodology to identify and measure the effects of the direction of technological change in terms of technological congruence and its effects on total factor productivity (TFP). Evolution...

The Schumpeterian creative response provides an effective framework to understand the determinants of the twin and self-supporting loop relationship between export and innovation in the global economy. Exports spur the creative response and innovation efforts which lead to the introduction and adoption of technological innovations that increase lab...

The paper shows how and why international trade and endogenous technological change are part of a Schumpeterian loop in advanced countries. Imports stir the creative response of firms exposed to global competition and engender the introduction of productivity-enhancing innovations that are contingent upon the knowledge and competence available in e...

Globalization and the new understanding of the properties of knowledge, with particular attention to the limits of its appropriability, exhaustibility, transferability, and its accumulation as a result of its recombinant generation, support the revival of the Schumpeterian intuition of innovation as a creative response and its blending with the Lam...

When competition takes place in homogenous product markets between firms based in heterogeneous factor markets, the strategic introduction of biased technological change, directed towards the intensive use of factors that are locally and exclusively cheaper, can increase knowledge appropriability. The appreciation of the strategic direction of tech...

In the catch-up literature, more attention has been paid to the rate rather than the direction of technological change. This paper presents and implements a novel methodology to identify and measure the effects of the direction of technological change in terms of technological congruence and its effects on total factor productivity (TFP). Evolution...

A knowledge complexity trade-off can be identified if and when the complexity of the stock of knowledge engenders positive effects in the recombinant generation of new technological knowledge but negative ones in its exploitation in terms of productivity gains. On the one hand, the complexity of the stock of knowledge increases the scope for recomb...

Advanced economies are characterised by the parallel increase of income inequality and of the role of knowledge intensive activities that substitute the manufacturing industry at the core of the system. Radical changes in the organisation of the generation, appropriation and exploitation of technological knowledge increase the levels of knowledge r...

Recent advances of the economics of knowledge about the properties of knowledge as an economic good with the identification of the limited exhaustibility of knowledge and its positive effects in terms of diachronic knowledge externalities, question the foundations of the Arrovian postulate upon which the provision of public support to R&D activitie...

The paper implements the competent demand-pull hypothesis that grafts the advances of the economics of knowledge on the Kaldor–Schmookler demand-pull approach. Demand-pulling effects occur only if the increase of derived demand for both capital and intermediary inputs is accompanied by knowledge interactions carried by market transactions. The comp...

The direction and rate of technological change in the global economy exhibit contrasting trends. Since the end of the XX century, the rate of technical change measured by productivity growth has been stronger if its direction is more labor-intensive. This puzzling finding can be explained using an interpretative framework that integrates the induce...

The analysis of knowledge as an economic good has paid much attention to its limited appropriability. Lesser attention has been paid to its limited exhaustibility. The implications of the limited exhaustibility of knowledge is most important both for economics and economic policy. The effects of the limited exhaustibility of knowledge may compensat...

Recent advances in the economics of knowledge are raising questions related to the current intellectual property regime. This paper discusses the foundations of the appropriability trade-off, highlights the crucial distinction between inter- and intra-industry spillovers, and advocates the introduction of patents based on a combination of property...

This chapter summarizes the main achievements of the economics of knowledge with special attention to the central role of the limited exhaustibility of knowledge and its implications in terms of cumulability and extensibility. It recalls the early economics of knowledge. It explores the generation and exploitation of knowledge with the technology p...

‘This important new book provides a penetrating, novel analysis of the key role played by knowledge when viewed through the lens of Schumpeterian economics. It is loaded with important insights that highlight the primacy of knowledge and innovation to unleash economic growth.’ —David B. Audretsch, Indiana University Bloomington, USA This book combi...

The extension of the Schumpeterian "creative response" to international trade.

In the standard Hecksher-Ohlin (HO) model, the specialization of countries is exogenous and static. This work elaborates the hypothesis that the specialization of countries is the endogenous outcome of the creative response of firms caught in out-of-equilibrium conditions by the changing conditions of factor and product markets. It presents three m...

Large evidence confirms substantial wage differences between small and large firms. The paper contributes the extant literature by discussing two competing hypotheses behind the higher average wage observed in large firms. According to the first line of analysis the wage premium reflects substantial differences in the bargaining power of unionized...

Technological congruence identifies the coherence between the direction of technological change and input costs in an economy and measures its effects on Total Factor Productivity (TFP). The search for technological congruence is constrained by the systemic characteristics of the countries where it takes place with special attention to the types of...

The identification of the increasing returns triggered by the limited exhaustibility of knowledge and of the central role of the interindustrial knowledge externalities triggered by the dissemination of knowledge across product markets calls for a new knowledge policy aimed at reducing the exclusivity of the intellectual property regime with the in...

This introduction presents the analytical framework implemented by the book as the grafting of the tools elaborated by the economics of knowledge and the legacy of Joseph Schumpeter to explore the foundations of the new knowledge economy and the shift away from the corporate growth regime. It frames the innovation process as a creative response bas...

This chapter elaborates the notion of Schumpeterian growth regimes highlighting the central role of the systemic mechanisms of governance of the interaction and coordination that characterize the generation, use and exploitation of knowledge as the distinctive economic activity that is at the heart of economic systems. It introduces the distinction...

This chapter elaborates a unifying approach to the determinants of technological change that brings together the frameworks of the Schumpeterian creative response, the induced technological change, the demand pull and the localized technological change. The integrated framework enables to explore the effects of absolute and relative technological c...

The mechanisms of generation and exploitation of the new knowledge growth regime have major implications on income distribution and are likely to trigger a substantial segmentation of labor markets into the markets for skilled and creative labor and the markets for standard labor. In the context of the globalization of product markets factor costs...

The paper elaborates an agent based simulation model (ABM) to explore the endogenous long-term dynamics of knowledge externalities. ABMs, as a form of artificial cliometrics, allow the analysis of the effects of the reactivity of firms caught in out-of-equilibrium conditions conditional on the levels of endogenous knowledge externalities stemming f...

This paper accommodates the new understanding of the limited exhaustibility of knowledge into the Schumpeterian frame of the creative response to articulate a comprehensive model of Schumpeterian growth. The limited exhaustibility of knowledge and its transient appropriability favor the accumulation of a stock of quasi-public knowledge. The increas...

The analysis of the Marshallian and Schumpeterian microfoundations of endogenous innovation enables to draw a line between the new emerging evolutionary complexity from biological evolutionary analysis and to overcome its limits. The paper integrates the Marshallian process of imitation and selection with the Schumpeterian creative response. In Mar...

The notion of endogenous innovation as the outcome of the creative response of firms to out-of-equilibrium conditions is the cornerstone of the new evolutionary complexity. This essay explores the role of the reactivity of firms to out-of-equilibrium conditions and of knowledge governance in assessing the chances that creative responses actually ta...

The locus of knowledge externalities and the cost of knowledge. Regional Studies. This paper provides an extended Crépon–Duguet–Mairesse (CDM) approach to analyse jointly the simultaneous effects of knowledge spillovers in the knowledge-generation and technology production functions. It introduces the distinction between imitation and knowledge ext...

The paper presents a new methodology to identify the effects of the introduction of directed technological change on the measure of total factor productivity growth. Its application to the evidence of Italian economic growth in the years 1861–2010 confirms that technological change has been strongly directed with relevant effects on the actual leve...

The paper presents a new methodology to identify the effects of the introduction of directed technological change on the measure of total factor productivity growth. Its application to the evidence of Italian economic growth in the years 1861-2010 confirms that technological change has been strongly directed with relevant effects on the actual leve...

Knowledge composition, Jacobs externalities and innovation performance in European regions. Regional Studies. This paper analyses the role of the composition of the regional stock of knowledge in explaining innovation performance. It provides three main contributions. First, it investigates the relevance of Jacobs knowledge externalities in charact...

The introduction of information and communication technologies (ICT) has changed in depth the organization of the generation of knowledge reducing significantly knowledge absorption cost and improving knowledge interactions. The digital generation of knowledge relies on the systematic access and use of the stock of quasi-public knowledge. ICT enabl...

The limits of both evolutionary approaches, based upon biological metaphors, and the new growth theory based on the early economics of knowledge, are becoming apparent. Considerable progress can be made by implementing an evolutionary complexity approach that builds upon the legacy of Schumpeter [1947a. ‘The Creative Response in Economic History’....

Increasing levels of income inequality have recently attracted much attention. The literature has concentrated on the hypothesis that increasing levels of income inequality are the cause of slow growth and social unbalances. This paper contributes to exploring an alternative hypothesis according to which increasing levels of income inequality are t...

This paper calls attention on the effects of the economic properties of knowledge on its derived demand, an issue that has not received enough attention in the literature. The results of the analysis suggests that, because of the idiosyncratic – Arrovian – properties of knowledge, a chain of effects takes place: (i) in downstream markets the price...

The transition to the knowledge economy seems far bumpier than it had been anticipated. The understanding of the structural changes that parallel the transition to the knowledge economy is indispensable in order to distinguish between short and long term dynamics and absolutely necessary to identify the new emerging characters of advanced economic...

The paper uncovers the merits of the essay «The creative response in economic history» published by Joseph Alois Schumpeter in the Journal of Economic History in 1947 and 'almost' forgotten since then. The correct appreciation of this Schumpeterian contribution is important to for two reasons. It enables to better understand the evolution of Schump...

The study implements the Schumpeterian notion of creative reaction to articulate and test the hypothesis that the shift to the knowledge economy in advanced economies is the result of the creative reaction of firms, caught in out-of-equilibrium conditions by the fast globalization of product and factor markets since the last decade of the 20th cent...

This paper elaborates the microeconomic foundations of the demand pull hypothesis stressing the role of vertical knowledge externalities stemming from user-producer knowledge interactions that parallel vertical transactions. The paper articulates and tests the hypothesis that such competent demand is actually able to pull technological change only...

This paper contributes to the economics of knowledge with an analysis of the knowledge cost function, shedding light on the determinants of the large variance in the cost of knowledge across firms. The amount and the composition of external knowledge and the internal stocks of knowledge that firms can access and use in the generation of new technol...

This paper investigates the dynamics of productivity in a large sample of Italian manufacturing firms, focusing on the determinants of firm-level persistence in time of high total factor productivity (TFP) growth rates relative to the corresponding sectoral distributions. In particular, we assess the impact of both the internal characteristics of c...

This paper explores the role of internal and external knowledge in the generation of new technological knowledge. It implements the notion of recombinant knowledge generation function with the appreciation of: (i) the complementary—as opposed to supplementary—role of external knowledge and (ii) the role of the size and composition of the internal s...

This paper explores the effects of the accumulation of savings on the creative reaction of firms, the search for technological congruence and the direction of technological change with a Schumpeterian model of endogenous growth. The model shows how the accumulation of wealth accounts for the reduction of the relative user cost of capital and activa...

The paper investigates intersectoral linkages between manufacturing and services under the competent demand pull hypothesis. This hypothesis postulates that the demand pulls the innovative capacities of the suppliers only when and if they are accompanied by qualified knowledge interactions with creative customers. We empirically investigate this hy...

The paper by Ji and Wang (J Technol Transf, 2013) calls new attention on the analysis of the effects of the direction of technological change. The aim of this paper is to better articulate and test the theoretical arguments that the direction of technological changes has specific effects on the efficiency of the production process and to study the...

This paper considers university–industry relations, identifying the heterogeneity of academic knowledge with respect to economic growth and analysing its implication for the working of the academic mode of knowledge governance. It provides unique historical evidence on the differentiated effects of academic spillovers, using professorial chairs dis...

The analysis of the characteristics of firms helps to understand the causes and consequences of the direction of technological change. Firms differ substantially with respect to the type of technological knowledge they can generate and exploit through technological innovations. This in turn has major effects on the direction of technological change...

Public policy plays a key role in supporting R&D activities and a variety of policy tools have been applied to contrast the undersupply of technological knowledge including the provision of subsidies to private firms performing R&D activities. A large literature has identified the sources of ‘government failures’ in discretionary procedures in prob...

Building upon both the Schumpeterian and the Marshallian legacies, this paper elaborates a model of localized technological change cum pecuniary knowledge externalities to provide a systemic explanation for total factor productivity. The generation of technological knowledge consists in the recombination of existing bits of heterogeneous technologi...

This paper contributes the analysis of the persistence of innovation activities, as measured by different innovation indicators and explores its past and path dependent characteristics. The study provides new insights on the role of R&D investments in innovation persistence and analyses differentiated patterns of persistence across product and proc...

This chapter opens up for new perspectives on how to understand the development and the choice of technology solutions by distinguishing between (i) moving the best practice frontier downwards and (ii) settling on a specific factor combination (specific factor ratio). As a matter of fact, higher levels of efficiency can be obtained with two distinc...

The slow growth of advanced economies since the late 90s is interpreted as the transient and apparent consequence of the discontinuity engendered by the sequence of institutional, technological and structural changes towards a knowledge intensive economy. The origins of such discontinuity can be grasped with an interpretative frame based upon the g...

This paper contributes to the analysis of the persistence of innovation activities, as measured by total factor productivity (TFP), and explores its internal and external determinants stressing its path-dependent characteristics. The external conditions, namely the quality of local knowledge pools and the strength of the Schumpeterian rivalry, alon...

The aim of the paper is to contribute the debate on the accountability of the academic system. To this it grafts the recent advances of the economics of knowledge into the economics of the academic system. The paper elaborates and tests the hypothesis that there are different types of academic knowledge that exert different effects on economic grow...

The paper explores the causes and effects of persistence in the discretionary allocation of public subsidies to R&D activities performed by private firms in high-tech and low-tech industries. It applies the distinction between vicious Matthew-effect and virtuous Matthew-effect. The former qualifies the persistence in the discretionary allocation of...

Antonelli C. and Quatraro F. Localized technological change and efficiency wages across European regional labour markets, Regional Studies. Internal labour markets and industrial relations in Continental Europe are characterized by substantial rigidity of employed labour engendered by the tight conditions of regional labour markets. This rigidity a...

The analysis of the evolution of the academic chairs of an academic system is a promising area of investigation. The exploration of the evolution of the size and the disciplinary composition of the stock of academic chairs in Italy in the years 1900- 1959 provides an opportunity to understand the contribution of scientific knowledge to economic gro...

The grafting of the tools of communication studies on the economics of knowledge helps to investigate the mechanisms of knowledge governance. The actual economic benefits stemming from knowledge externalities depend on the characteristics of a) their sources, b) the context in which spillovers take place, c) the possible recipients. In the Italian...

Purpose – This chapter analyzes the effects that the international integration of product markets induced by globalization exerts on the direction of technological change at the industry level. Methodology/approach – In order to do so it elaborates an interpretative framework that complements the classical inducement hypotheses with the Schumpeteri...

Purpose – This chapter aims at exploring the effects of globalization on technological change by focusing on the determinants of the direction of technological change at the firm level of analysis by following the induced technological change approach implemented by the localized technological change hypothesis. Methodology/approach – In the empiri...

Innovation is the result of intentional decision-making that takes place in out-of-equilibrium conditions. Profitability is a reliable indicator of equilibrium conditions, far better than competition, as it integrates the effects of out-of-equilibrium conditions in both product and factor markets. The farther the profitability from the average, the...

The editor of this Handbook, Cristiano Antonelli, is to be commended for the high quality of the group of authors he has assembled for this project. They provide excellent coverage of the various areas within the field, covering complexity of innovation, complexity of knowledge, complexity of structural change and development, and lessons and impli...

The paper elaborates the notion of innovation as an emerging property of complex system dynamics and presents an agent-based simulation model (ABM) of an economy where systemic knowledge interactions among heterogeneous agents are crucial for the recombinant generation of new technological knowledge and the introduction of innovations. In this appr...