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AbstractHow relatively good or bad were the economic performances of our past presidents?
The answers to this question remain unclear. Most evaluations of presidential
performance cloud the issue with partisan bias and subjective judgments or mix
economics together with other policy areas. To address these shortcomings, this
article uses new data from the Measuring Worth Project to calculate the relative
economic rankings of the United States presidents who served from 1789 until 2009.
It analyzes up to 220 years of data on economic growth, unemployment, inflation,
government debt, balance of payments, income inequality, currency strength, interest
rates, and stock market returns to estimate an economic grade point average for each
president. Then, these estimates are used to test for correlations with other
variables to generate hypotheses regarding the conditions for superior and inferior
economic performance.

AbstractThis conclusion attempts to answer three sets of questions regarding our experiment in cross‐field collaboration: What did we find and were these findings cohesive? What did our findings add to the debate? What are the implications of our findings, and, more importantly, what's next? It suggests that politics have become a "reverse salient" in innovation theory. Specifically, innovation scholars have yet to devise a theory that fully incorporates distributive politics and their security and competitiveness implications into a general explanation of technological change. This gap is holding back progress in fields that depend on innovation as an explanatory variable. It should therefore be made a priority for innovation scholars across the social sciences.

AbstractThe conventional wisdom among political economists holds that domestic institutions determine national innovation rates. However, after decades of research, there is still no agreement on precisely which domestic institutions matter or exactly how they affect innovation rates. Anecdotal observations within the research on institutions suggest that international linkages may be the missing piece to the national innovation rate puzzle. An exploratory probe is therefore performed here using regression analysis of various measures of innovation, domestic institutions, and international linkages. The results suggest that countries' relationships with the lead innovator strongly affect their innovation rates. The probe further suggests that research should move beyond institutions and linkages, and should focus instead on their political origins. That is, the current focus on institutions or linkages studies effects, not causes. It fails to get at the politics of technological change: the fundamental choices which nations must make in order to innovate successfully in the long run.

AbstractAre politically decentralized states better at fostering long‐run technological innovation than centralized states? Societies with decentralized governments are widely seen as agile, competitive, and well structured to adapt to innovation's gale of creative destruction. Meanwhile, centralized states, even when democratic, have come to be viewed as rigid and thus hostile to the risks, costs, and change associated with new technology, or prone to cling too long to foolhardy or outdated technological projects. Therefore government decentralization is often perceived as a necessary institutional foundation for encouraging long‐run technological innovation. However, in this article, I analyze data on international patent activity, scientific publications, and high‐technology exports, and show that there exists little evidence for an aggregate relationship between government structure and technological innovation.