Zvi Griliches's contributions to the economics of technology and growth*

^*Substantial improvements in the paper were made in response to the comments of two anonymous referees. I am grateful for substantial research assistance on this project from Ke Yang. I have also received useful research assistance from Erkin Sahinoz and Lei Wang. I appreciate the advice or assistance that I have received from several individuals associated with Institute for Scientific Information, including Eugene Garfield and David Pendlebury. An earlier version of the paper was presented in Atlanta on January 5, 2002 at the American Economic Association session: “In Honor of Zvi Griliches.” A few sentences in the paper have been adapted from my paper “Edwin Mansfield's Contributions to the Economics of Technology.” Figure 1 of the paper is reprinted from Econometrica 1957 with permission from the Econometric Society10.1080/10438590410001629043-GEIN_A_9612473_O_fig1

Figure 1Percentage of total corn acreage planted with hybrid seed. (Source: USDA, agricultural statistics, various years.) {Reprinted with permission from Griliches, Econometrica, 1957.}

Abstract

Zvi Griliches's contributions to the economics of technology and growth are identified. Included is a discussion of his contributions on: the determinants of differences in speed of adoption of innovations; the use of patents to measure technology; the private and social returns to R&D; and spillover effects from R&D. Griliches's own evaluation of his research contribution is compared to the evaluation of others in the field, using as evidence citation counts of his works collected from the online Web of Science. Griliches's most important contribution is his 1957 Econometrica hybrid corn paper that is a foundation of the economics of technological innovation. Remarkably, the trend in annual citations to the paper has continued to increase for over 40 years. Finally, we summarize Griliches's most recent views on the practice of economics and on the most important unanswered questions in the economics of technology and growth.

Keywords:

• Technology
• R&D
• Growth
• Productivity
• Patents
• Griliches

Notes

¹Rosenberg (1974) and others saluted him for this effort.

^*Substantial improvements in the paper were made in response to the comments of two anonymous referees. I am grateful for substantial research assistance on this project from Ke Yang. I have also received useful research assistance from Erkin Sahinoz and Lei Wang. I appreciate the advice or assistance that I have received from several individuals associated with Institute for Scientific Information, including Eugene Garfield and David Pendlebury. An earlier version of the paper was presented in Atlanta on January 5, 2002 at the American Economic Association session: “In Honor of Zvi Griliches.” A few sentences in the paper have been adapted from my paper “Edwin Mansfield's Contributions to the Economics of Technology.” Figure 1 of the paper is reprinted from Econometrica 1957 with permission from the Econometric Society

Figure 1 Percentage of total corn acreage planted with hybrid seed. (Source: USDA, agricultural statistics, various years.) {Reprinted with permission from Griliches, Econometrica, 1957.}

²Mansfield credits Schumpeter with founding the field (1995, I, p. ix) Rosenberg has gone so far as to say: “…the study of technological innovation… still consists of a series of footnotes upon Schumpeter.” (Rosenberg, 1982, p. 106) Griliches (R&D,…, 2000, p. 45) lists Schumpeter with four other “major” early economists who recognized the importance of technological innovation.

³Warsh (1994) suggested that Griliches and Jorgenson might receive the Nobel together. Gary Becker was quoted (in Warsh 1999) as saying: “He was a serious contender for a Nobel Prize. I was hoping, on sentimental grounds, that he might get it this year.” A 1996 Wall Street Journal article that polled 39 “top economists” concluded that Griliches was one of five leading contenders for the Prize (Phillips). In his 1990 predictions, Garfield found that Griliches ranked 23rd in lifetime citations. Of the 22 economists ranked ahead of him in citations, 11 had already received the Nobel Prize, and two had deceased without receiving it (Keynes and Robinson). Of the remaining nine economists ranked above Griliches three received the Nobel Prize since 1990 (Becker, Lucas and Sen). Milton Friedman has worried whether the Nobel Prize is good for the progress of economics: “…is it desirable in any discipline that a few scholars who have made their mark in that discipline should have the power to decide the kind of work that is prestigious, on which other scholars ought to concentrate if they want their work to be recognized as important? Is it desirable to have that much centralization of power effectively directing the course of research in basic fields?” (Friedman and Friedman, p. 443)

⁴Berlin quotes the Greek poet Archilochus as saying: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’. Berlin applies this to intellectuals by contrasting the hedgehogs “…, who relate everything to a single central vision,…” and the foxes “…who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way…” This contrast was applied to Jorgenson and Griliches by Warsh (1994). Griliches provides some support for the view that he was a “fox” in his JEP interview, when he notes that early on he was strongly influenced by a Popperian professor at Hebrew University (Krueger and Taylor, p. 175) where “Popperian” is used in the broad sense of skepticism toward uncritical ideology, as opposed to “Popperian” in the sense of Popper's specific methodology of science, as taken up, say, in Friedman's famous article (1953).

⁵Nerlove identifies the “central core of his contribution” as being “… a fuller and more quantitative understanding of the process of economic growth.” (p. F424).

⁶Levin identifies the other three founding giants as being Mansfield, Nelson, and Scherer.

⁷Besides the three compilations of his own articles, the rest of the books he edited were mainly collections of articles by other economists. One exception is the volume of Schmookler's patent work that Griliches co-edited with Hurwicz. A second exception is the volume with Ringstad on Economies of Scale and the Form of the Production Function. This book analyzes a Norwegian data set, finding that in general there were small increasing returns to Norwegian manufacturing.

⁸I am indebted to an anonymous referee for much of the substance of this paragraph on Griliches's survey in the 1995 Stoneman volume

⁹For a discussion of this point, see: Stigler, George J. and Claire Friedland. 1982, pp. 182 & 184.

¹⁰I summarize in the body of the paper, five of his six main observations. The sixth observation is that increases in productivity do not necessarily imply increases in social welfare if social welfare depends, in part, on the equality of income and wealth.

¹¹At the beginning of his survey article on patents, Griliches placed an epigraph that illustrates his wit, and his ambivalence toward problematic data that is relevant to an important question:

“Overheard at a Catskills Resort (one guest to another):

– The food is so terrible here.

– Yes, And the portions are so small.”

¹²Whether Warsh is right that the “tribe” is “small” might be doubted after visiting Iain Cockburn's “Tree of Zvi” web site that provides a genealogical tree of Griliches's students and colleagues: http:// people.bu.edu/cockburn/tree_of_zvi.html.