CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 1,058Economic Growth and ProductivityEconomic and Technological InnovationFirm Innovation and Growth

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 34 of the 36 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The Burden of Knowledge and the “Death of the Renaissance Man”: Is Innovation Getting Harder?

JONES, BENJAMIN F.·2009·Review of Economic Studies
DOI 10.1111/j.1467-937x.2008.00531.x
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

This paper investigates a possibly fundamental aspect of technological progress. If knowledge accumulates as technology advances, then successive generations of innovators may face an increasing educational burden. Innovators can compensate through lengthening educational phases and narrowing expertise, but these responses come at the cost of reducing individual innovative capacities, with implications for the organization of innovative activity—a greater reliance on teamwork—and negative implications for growth. Building on this “burden of knowledge” mechanism, this paper first presents six facts about innovator behaviour. I show that age at first invention, specialization, and teamwork increase over time in a large micro-data set of inventors. Furthermore, in cross-section, specialization and teamwork appear greater in deeper areas of knowledge, while, surprisingly, age at first invention shows little variation across fields. A model then demonstrates how these facts can emerge in tandem. The theory further develops explicit implications for economic growth, providing an explanation for why productivity growth rates did not accelerate through the 20th century despite an enormous expansion in collective research effort. Upward trends in academic collaboration and lengthening doctorates, which have been noted in other research, can also be explained in this framework. The knowledge burden mechanism suggests that the nature of innovation is changing, with negative implications…

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1111/j.1467-937x.2008.00531.x

Cites

34 of 34 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cites

Show all 36 references

Research works printed but not linked: 7

  1. BARRO, 1995, Economic Growth
  2. EVENSON, 1991, Technology and Productivity: The Challenge for Economic Policy, 233
  3. KORTUM, 1993, “Equilibrium R&D and the Decline in the Patent-R&D Ratio: U.S. Evidence”, American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, 83, 450
  4. KUHN, 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
  5. NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL, 1990, On Time to the Doctorate: A Study of the Lengthening Time to Completion for Doctorates in Science and Engineering
  6. TILGHMAN, 1998, Trends in the Early Careers of Life Sciences
  7. ZUCKERMAN, 1973, The Sociology of Science, 497

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Items 501–600 of 997

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
JONES, B. F.
Affiliations
Northwestern University (US)
Corresponding author
JONES, BENJAMIN F.
ORCID
JONES, BENJAMIN F.
Venue
Review of Economic Studies
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Published
2009-01
Volume
76
Issue
1
Pages
283-317
ISSN
  • 0034-6527 (ISSN-L)
  • 1467-937X
DOI
10.1111/j.1467-937x.2008.00531.x
OpenAlex
W3124253902
Cited by
1,058
References
36
Citations by year
2026: 107 · 2025: 103 · 2024: 113 · 2023: 86 · 2022: 72 · 2021: 76 · 2020: 60 · 2019: 63 · 2018: 54 · 2017: 62 · 2016: 26 · 2015: 45 · 2014: 48 · 2013: 48 · 2012: 37
FWCI
42.38
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
  • The Review of Economic Studies (publishedVersion)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
  • HighWire Press Open Archive (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Economic Growth and Productivity
  • Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Economic and Technological Innovation
  • Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Firm Innovation and Growth
Keywords
technological progress, innovators, specialization, teamwork, educational burden, economic growth, productivity growth, research collaboration

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review