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John Williams, in research with Charles Jones, has studied the issue of whether a market economy undertakes enough (or possibly too much) R&D and concludes that we invest far too little in R&D. Estimates of return to society to R&D are much higher than the return to financial investments, implying that the optimal amount of R&D is at least twice as high as that we do. In research with Simon Gilchrist, he has analyzed the effects of changes in productivity on the economy using a model with putty-clay capital and finds that innovations to technology are a significant source of business cycle and longer-term macroeconomic fluctuations. They also find that the gradual adoption of new technologies helps explain the "economic miracles" of postwar Germany and Japan. In research with Rochelle Edge and Thomas Laubach, he is studying the role of shifts in trend productivity growth in explaining the very different U.S. macroeconomic performance in the 1970s and the 1990s.