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The goal of this paper is to assess the influence of spatial mobility of knowledge workers on the formation of ties of scientific and industrial collaboration across European regions. Co-location has been traditionally invoked to ease formal collaboration between individuals and firms, since tie formation costs increase with physical distance between partners. In some instances, highly-skilled actors might become mobile and bridge regional networks across separate locations. This paper estimates a fixed effects logit model to ascertain precisely whether there exists a ‘previous co-location premium’ in the formation of networks across European regions.

For most of the post-war period developing countries have been told that relying on licensing for technology transfer is likely to yield disappointing results. However, this view of licensing has come a full circle as technology services trade has boomed since the 1990s. We outline the main trends in the growth of disembodied technology trade vis-a-vis international licensing and the trade in R&D and technical services. We show that there is considerable heterogeneity across countries in the form of technology trade that countries specialize in and also suggest these are related to underlying appropriability conditions and IPR regimes.

In more and more situations, artificially intelligent algorithms have to model humans’ (social) preferences on whose behalf they increasingly make decisions. They can learn these preferences through the repeated observation of human behavior in social encounters. In such a context, do individuals adjust the selfishness or prosociality of their behavior when it is common knowledge that their actions produce various externalities through the training of an algorithm? In an online experiment, we let participants’ choices in dictator games train an algorithm. Thereby, they create an externality on future decision making of an intelligent system that affects future participants. We show that individuals who are aware of the consequences of their training on the pay- offs of a future generation behave more prosocially, but only when they bear the risk of being harmed themselves by future algorithmic choices. In that case, the externality of artificially intelligence training induces a significantly higher share of egalitarian decisions in the present.

We use the prolonged Greek crisis as a case study to understand how a lasting economic shock affects the innovation strategies of firms in economies with moderate innovation activities. Adopting the 3-stage CDM model, we explore the link between R&D, innovation, and productivity for different size groups of Greek manufacturing firms during the prolonged crisis. At the first stage, we find that the continuation of the crisis is harmful for the R&D engagement of smaller firms while it increased the willingness for R&D activities among the larger ones. At the second stage, among smaller firms the knowledge production remains unaffected by R&D investments, while among larger firms the R&D decision is positively correlated with the probability of producing innovation, albeit the relationship is weakened as the crisis continues. At the third stage, innovation output benefits only larger firms in terms of labor productivity, while the innovation-productivity nexus is insignificant for smaller firms during the lasting crisis.

Does the pattern of social connections between individuals matter for macroeconomic outcomes? If so, where do differences in these patterns come from and how large are their effects? Using network analysis tools, we explore how different social network structures affect technology diffusion and thereby a country’s rate of growth. The correlation between high-diffusion networks and income is strongly positive. But when we use a model to isolate the effect of a change in social networks on growth, the effect can be positive, negative, or zero. The reason is that networks diffuse both ideas and disease. Low-diffusion networks have evolved in countries where disease is prevalent because limited connectivity protects residents from epidemics. But a low-diffusion network in a low-disease environment compromises the diffusion of good ideas. In general, social networks have evolved to fit their economic and epidemiological environment. Trying to change networks in one country to mimic those in a higher-income country may well be counterproductive.

What are the prospects for long-run economic growth? One prominent line of economic thinking is the trend toward stagnation. Stagnationism has a long history in economics, beginning prominently with Malthus and occasionally surfacing in different guises. Prominent themes here are the following: Will economic growth slow and perhaps even reverse under the weight of resource depletion? Will overpopulation and diminishing returns lower living standards? Will unchecked CO2 emissions lead to catastrophic changes in climate and human systems? Have we depleted the store of potential great inventions? Will the aging society lead to diminished innovativeness? (JEL D83, E25, O31, O32, O41, O47)

Both the number and types of mobile applications have been seeing a significant increase in the last few years. Such an increase can lead to an overwhelming situation for researchers, users, and developers who are trying to understand them from many different viewpoints. One way to create a more tractable treatment of both the current as well as the emerging mobile applications is to develop a taxonomy of mobile applications. This paper describes an on-going work towards developing such a taxonomy, which could also lead to the design and development of new mobile applications to fit in the voids identified by the taxonomy.

Cryptocurrencies provide a unique opportunity to identify how derivatives impact spot markets. They are fully fungible, trade across multiple spot exchanges at different prices, and futures contracts were selectively introduced on bitcoin (BTC) exchange rates against the USD in December 2017. Following the futures introduction, we find a significantly greater increase in cross-exchange price synchronicity for BTC--USD relative to other exchange rate pairs, as demonstrated by an increase in price correlations and a reduction in arbitrage opportunities and volatility. We also find support for an increase in price efficiency, market quality, and liquidity. The evidence suggests that futures contracts allowed investors to circumvent trading frictions associated with short sale constraints, arbitrage risk associated with block confirmation time, and market segmentation. Overall, our analysis supports the view that the introduction of BTC--USD futures was beneficial to the bitcoin spot market by making the underlying prices more informative.

This paper-based dissertation aims to contribute to the open innovation (OI) and technology management (TM) research fields by investigating their mechanisms, and potentials at the operational level. The dissertation connects the well-known concept of technology management with OI formats and applies these on specific manufacturing technologies within a clearly defined setting. Technological breakthroughs force firms to continuously adapt and reinvent themselves. The pace of technological innovation and their impact on firms is constantly increasing due to more connected infrastructure and accessible resources (i.e. data, knowledge). Especially in the manufacturing sector it is one key element to leverage new technologies to stay competitive. These technological shifts call for new management practices. TM supports firms with various tools to manage these shifts at different levels in the firm. It is a multifunctional and multidisciplinary field as it deals with all aspects of integrating technological issues into business decision-making and is directly relevant to a number of core business processes. Thus, it makes sense to utilize this theory and their practices as a foundation of this dissertation. However, considering the increasing complexity and number of technologies it is not sufficient anymore for firms to only rely on previous internal R&D and managerial practices. OI can expanse these practices by involving distributed innovation processes and accessing further external knowledge sources. This expansion can lead to an increasing innovation performance and thereby accelerate the time-to-market of technologies. Research in this dissertation was based on the expectations that OI formats will support the R&D activities of manufacturing technologies on the operational level by providing access to resources, knowledge, and leading-edge technology. The dissertation represents uniqueness regarding the rich practical data sets (observations, internal documents, project reviews) drawn from a very large German high-tech firm. The researcher was embedded in an R&D unit within the operational TM department for manufacturing technologies. The analyses include 1.) an exploratory in-depth analysis of a crowdsourcing initiative to elaborate the impact on specific manufacturing technologies, 2.) a deductive approach for developing a technology evaluation score model to create a common understanding of the value of selected manufacturing technologies at the operational level, and 3.) an abductive reasoning approach in form of a longitudinal case study to derive important indicator for the in-process activities of science-based partnership university-industry collaboration format. Thereby, the dissertation contributed to research and practice 1.) linkages of TM and OI practices to assimilate technologies at the operational level, 2.) insights about the impact of CS on manufacturing technologies and a related guideline to execute CS initiatives in this specific environment 3.) introduction of manufacturing readiness levels and further criteria into the TM and OI research field to support decision-makers in the firm in gaining a common understanding of the maturity of manufacturing technologies and, 4.) context-specific important indicators for science based university-industry collaboration projects and a holistic framework to connect TM with the university-industry collaboration approach The findings of this dissertation illustrate that OI formats can support the acceleration of time-to-market of manufacturing technologies and further improve the technical requirements of the product by leveraging external capabilities. The conclusions and implications made are intended to foster further research and improve managerial practices to evolve TM into an open collaborative context with interconnectivities between all internal and external involved technologies, individuals and organizational levels. Das Ziel dieser Dissertation ist es zu dem Forschungsfeld einen Beitrag zu den Forschungsfeldern Open Innovation (OI) und Technologiemanagement (TM) zu leisten, indem ihre Mechanismen und Potenziale auf der operativen Ebene untersucht werden. Die Dissertation verbindet das bekannte Konzept des Technologiemanagements mit OI-Formaten und wendet diese in einem klar definierten Rahmen auf spezifische Fertigungstechnologien an. Technologische Durchbrüche zwingen Unternehmen dazu, sich ständig anzupassen und neu zu erfinden. Das Tempo der technologischen Innovation und ihre Auswirkungen auf Unternehmen nehmen aufgrund einer stärker vernetzten Infrastruktur und zugänglicher Ressourcen (d. h. Daten, Wissen) ständig zu. Gerade in der verarbeitenden Industrie ist es ein Schlüsselelement, neue Technologien zu nutzen, um wettbewerbsfähig zu bleiben. Diese technologischen Veränderungen erfordern neue Managementpraktiken. TM unterstützt Unternehmen mit verschiedenen Tools, um diese Verschiebungen auf verschiedenen Ebenen im Unternehmen zu bewältigen. Es ist ein multifunktionales und multidisziplinäres Feld, da es sich mit allen Aspekten der Integration technologischer Fragen in die Geschäftsentscheidungen befasst und direkt für eine Reihe von Kerngeschäftsprozessen relevant ist. Daher ist es sinnvoll, diese Theorie und ihre Praktiken als Grundlage dieser Dissertation zu verwenden. Angesichts der zunehmenden Komplexität und Anzahl von Technologien reicht es jedoch nicht mehr aus, dass sich Unternehmen nur auf frühere interne F&E- und Managementpraktiken verlassen. OI kann diese Praktiken erweitern, indem verteilte Innovationsprozesse einbezogen werden und auf weitere externe Wissensquellen zugegriffen wird. Dieser Ausbau kann zu einer steigenden Innovationsleistung führen und damit die Time-to-Market von Technologien beschleunigen. Die Forschung in dieser Dissertation basierte auf der Erwartung, dass OI-Formate die F&E-Aktivitäten von Fertigungstechnologien auf operativer Ebene unterstützen, indem sie Zugang zu Ressourcen, Wissen und Spitzentechnologie bieten. Die Dissertation stellt eine Einzigartigkeit in Bezug auf die reichhaltigen Praxisdatensätze (Beobachtungen, interne Dokumente, Projektbewertungen) aus einem sehr großen deutschen High-Tech-Unternehmen dar. Der Forscher war in eine F&E-Einheit innerhalb der operativen TM-Abteilung für Fertigungstechnologien eingebettet. Die Analysen umfassen 1.) eine explorative eingehende Analyse einer Crowdsourcing(CS)-Initiative, um die Auswirkungen auf bestimmte Fertigungstechnologien zu elaborieren, 2.) einen deduktiven Ansatz zur Entwicklung eines Technologiebewertungs-Score-Modells, um ein gemeinsames Verständnis des Wertes ausgewählter Fertigungstechnologien auf operativer Ebene zu schaffen und 3.) ein abduktiver Argumentationsansatz in Form einer Langzeit-Fallstudie, um wichtige Indikatoren für die prozessinternen Aktivitäten innerhalb wissenschaftsbasierten universitären-industriellen Kollaborationsformaten abzuleiten. Dadurch leistete die Dissertation einen Beitrag zu Forschung und Praxis durch 1.) Verknüpfungen von TM- und OI-Praktiken, um Technologien auf operativer Ebene zu assimilieren, 2.) Einblicke in die Auswirkungen von CS auf Fertigungstechnologien und eine entsprechende Richtlinie zur Durchführung von CS-Initiativen in diesem spezifischen Umfeld, 3.) die Einführung von Fertigungsreifegraden und weiteren Kriterien in das TM- und OI-Forschungsfeld, um Entscheidungsträger im Unternehmen zu einem gemeinsamen Verständnis über den Reifegrad von Fertigungstechnologien zu unterstützen und 4.) kontextspezifisch wichtige Indikatoren für wissenschaftsbasierte universitäre-industrielle Kollaborationsprojekte und ein ganzheitlichen Rahmen zur Verknüpfung von TM mit dem Ansatz der universitären-industriellen Kollaborationen. Die Ergebnisse dieser Dissertation veranschaulichen, dass OI-Formate durch die Nutzung externer Fähigkeiten die Beschleunigung der Markteinführungszeit von Fertigungstechnologien unterstützen und die technischen Funktionen des Produkts verbessern können. Die Schlussfolgerungen und Implikationen sollen weitere Forschungen anregen und Managementpraktiken verbessern, um TM zu einem offenen kollaborativen Ansatz zu entwickeln, der alle internen und externen beteiligten Technologien, Einzelpersonen und Organisationsebenen vernetzt.

The aging of the scientific workforce and graying of grant recipients are central policy concerns in biomedicine. These trends are potentially important because older scientists are often seen as less open to new ideas than younger scientists. In this paper, we put this hypothesis to an empirical test. Using a measure of new ideas derived from the text of nearly all biomedical scientific articles published since 1946, we compare the tendency of younger and older researchers to try out new ideas in their work. We find that papers published in biomedicine by younger researchers are more likely to build on new ideas. Collaboration with an experienced researcher matters as well. Papers with a young first author and a more experienced last author are more likely to try out newer ideas than papers published by other team configurations. Given the crucial role that the trying out of new ideas plays in the advancement of science, our results buttress the case for funding scientific work by young researchers but also provide a caution against unconditional idolatry of youth over experience.

This paper quantifies the roles of increases in the demand for skill-intensive output, the efficient scale of service production, and female labor supply in the growth of services. We extend the Buera and Kaboski (2012a,b) model to a two-person household, incorporating a joint decision on home and market production, and allow for skill and sectoral biased technology progress. The rising scale of services, the rising demand for skill-intensive output, and skill-biased technical change all play dominant roles. Furthermore, the extended model explains the majority of the increase in female labor supply, which also plays a role in services growth.

We estimate a stochastic life-cycle model of endogenous health spending, asset accumulation and retirement to investigate the causes behind the increase in health spending and longevity in the U.S. over the period 1965-2005. We estimate that technological change and the increase in the generosity of health insurance on their own may explain 36% of the rise in health spending (technology 30% and insurance 6%), while income explains only 4% and other health trends 0.5%. By simultaneously occurring over this period, these changes may have led to complementarity effects which we find to explain an additional 57% increase in health spending. The estimates suggest that the elasticity of health spending with respect to changes in both income and insurance is larger with co-occurring improvements in technology. Technological change, taking the form of increased health care productivity at an annual rate of 1.3%, explains almost all of the rise in life expectancy at age 25 over this period, while changes in insurance and income together explain less than 10%. Welfare gains are substantial and most of the gain appears to be due to technological change.

We study the impact of alternative innovation policies on the short- and long-run performance of the economy, as well as on public finances, extending the Schumpeter meeting Keynes agent-based model (Dosi et al., 2010). In particular, we consider market-based innovation policies such as R&D subsidies to firms, tax discount on investment, and direct policies akin to the “Entrepreneurial State” (Mazzucato, 2013), involving the creation of public research oriented firms diffusing technologies along specific trajectories, and funding a Public Research Lab conducting basic research to achieve radical innovations that enlarge the technological opportunities of the economy. Simu- lation results show that all policies improve productivity and GDP growth, but the best outcomes are achieved by active discretionary State policies, which are also able to crowd-in private investment and have positive hysteresis effects on growth dynamics. For the same size of public resources allocated to market-based interventions, “Mission” innovation policies deliver significantly better aggregate performance if the government is patient enough and willing to bear the intrinsic risks related to innovative activities.

We analyze the effect of the Öresund Bridge, a combined railway and motorway bridge between Swedish Malmö and the Danish capital Copenhagen, on inventive activity in the region of Malmö. Applying difference-in-difference estimation on individual-level data, our findings suggest that the Öresund Bridge led to a significant increase in the number of patents per individual in the Malmö region as compared to the two other major regions in Sweden, Gothenburg and Stockholm. We show that a key mechanism is the attraction of highly qualified workers to the Malmö region following the construction of the bridge.

We identify strong cross-border institutions as a driver for the globalization of in-novation. Using 67 million patents from over 100 patent offices, we introduce novel measures of innovation diffusion and collaboration. Exploiting staggered bilateral in-vestment treaties as shocks to cross-border property rights and contract enforcement, we show that signatory countries increase technology adoption and sourcing from each other. They also increase R&D collaborations. These interactions result in techno-logical convergence. The effects are particularly strong for process innovation, and for countries that are technological laggards or have weak domestic institutions. Increased inter-firm rather than intra-firm foreign investment is the key channel.

En este artículo se plantean cuestiones relacionadas con los efectos que el cambio de época que estamos atravesando, genera en el funcionamiento de los sistemas democráticos y en las formas de funcionar de las administraciones públicas. Se sostiene que la generalización de Internet ha modificado y modificará mucho más los procesos de policy making a los que estábamos acostumbrados, ya que produce grandes efectos en los procesos de intermediación que no aportan valor, y rompe esquemas más o menos asentados de negociación y configuración de políticas. Cada vez más la política y las políticas no es exclusivo de las instituciones, y ello obliga a ir más allá del debate histórico contemporáneo entre mercado y Estado. En ese contexto se exploran caminos para reforzar la transparencia y la participación ciudadana en el funcionamiento de las instituciones políticas y administrativas. Artikulu honetan pasatzen dugun era aldaketaren ondorioei buruzko ideiak adierazten dira. Zentzu horretan ondorio hauek nola eragiten duten sistema demokratikoen eta Herri Administrazioen funtzionamenduaren eratan. Interneten bilakaerak policy making prozesuak ohikoak baino askoz gehiago aldatu eta aldatuko dituela baieztatzen da. Bilakaera horrek ezbalioko bitarteko prozesuetan ondorio handiak eragiten dituelako. Gainera negoziazioaren eta politikan konfigurazioaren sustatutako eskemak apurtzen ditu. Gero eta gehiago politika eta politikak instituzioetan ez dira amaitzen. Horrek merkatuaren eta Estatuaren arteko eztabaida historikotik harantzago joanaraztera behartzen du. Testuinguru horretan politiko eta administrazioaren funtzionamenduaren gardentasuna eta herritar partaidetza indartzeko bideak miatzen dira. This paper examines issues concerned with the way in which the current change of era affects the workings of democratic systems and public administrations. It argues that the widespread use of the Internet has already changed the customary processes of policy- making, and will change them much more in the future, since it has a major effect on processes of intermediation that do not add value and it breaks away from relatively firmly established frameworks of negotiation and policy configuration. Increasingly, institutions are no longer the be-all-and-end-all of politics and policies. This means that it is necessary to go beyond the past and present debate between the market and the state. Against this background, the paper explores ways of strengthening transparency and public participation in the workings of political and administrative institutions.

With Big Data, decisions made by machine learning algorithms depend on training data generated by many individuals. In an experiment, we identify the effect of varying individual responsibility for the moral choices of an artificially intelligent algorithm. Across treatments, we manipulated the sources of training data and thus the impact of each individual's decisions on the algorithm. Diffusing such individual pivotality for algorithmic choices increased the share of selfish decisions and weakened revealed prosocial preferences. This does not result from a change in the structure of incentives. Rather, our results show that Big Data offers an excuse for selfish behavior through lower responsibility for one's and others' fate.

In this paper we explore whether low rates of sustained technology use can be explained by heterogeneity in returns to adoption. To do so we evaluate impacts of the Cocoa Abrabopa Association , which provided a package of fertilizer and other inputs on credit to cocoa farmers in Ghana. High estimated average productive impacts for treated farmers are found to be consistent with negative economic profits for a substantial proportion of the treated population. By constructing an individual specific measure of returns, we demonstrate that low realized returns among adopters are associated with low retention rates, even after conditioning on output levels and successful repayment. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that high average returns mask substantial and persistent heterogeneity, and that farmers experiment in order to learn about their idiosyncratic returns.

It is shown that spillovers can enhance private returns to innovation if they feed back into the dynamic research of the original inventor (Internalized spillovers), but will always reduce private returns, if the original inventor does not benefit from the advancements other inventors build into the 'spilled' knowledge (Externalized spillovers). I empirically identify unique patterns of knowledge flows (based on patent citations), which provide information about whether 'spilled' knowledge is reabsorbed by its inventor. A simple model of sequential innovation with dynamic spillovers is developed, which predicts that market value and R&D expenditures should rise with Internalized spillovers and fall with Externalized spillovers. These predications are confirmed using panel data on U.S. firms between 1981 and 2001. To the extent that firms internalize some of the spillovers they create, the classical underinvestment problem in R&D will be mitigated and the central role of spillovers in promoting economic growth will be enhanced.

This paper builds a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model of endogenous growth that is capable of generating substantial degrees of endogenous persistence in productivity. When products go out of patent protection, the rush of entry into their production destroys incentives for process improvements. Consequently, old production processes are enshrined in industries producing non-protected products, resulting in aggregate productivity persistence. Our model also generates sizeable delayed movements in productivity in response to preference shocks, providing a form of endogenous news shock. Finally, if we calibrate our model to match a high aggregate mark-up then we can replicate the negative response of hours to a positive technology shock, even without the inclusion of any frictions.

In this paper, I study how an increase in the use of new work practices that involve multi-tasking has affected the returns to experience. If each task in a job has a concave learning curve, then increasing the number of tasks may increase the returns to experience. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I provide evidence for the fact that successive cohorts have greater returns to experience. Next, I construct proxies for multi-tasking using Paul Osterman's 1992 survey of workplace practices in U.S. establishments, and find that (i) later cohorts choose jobs with greater multi-tasking, (ii) the rate of within-job wage growth rises with the degree of multi-tasking, and (iii) the returns to experience are larger in jobs with more multi-tasking. Finally, I find mixed evidence on the effect of unobserved heterogeneity, which implies that part of these larger returns to experience may be because those in jobs with more multi-tasking have higher unobserved ability.

What is the impact of joining the European Union on a small, less developed economy? This is the general question driving this research paper. In particular, the role of factor movements in explaining real wage behavior in Portugal after its entry in the European Union (EU) is evaluated. Based on these results, counterfactual exercises are performed to measure the impact of foreign investment and emigration on skilled and unskilled wages between 1985 and 1999. We find a small role for labor movements, and a more important one for capital inflows. This should constitute a good starting point to think about the consequences of the Eastern enlargement of the EU and of other integration experiences that abolish barriers to factor mobility.

Schooling has been shown to provide substantial externality benefits by increasing farm output and shifting the production frontier outwards. This paper investigates the role of schooling at the household- and site-levels in the adoption and diffusion of agricultural innovations in rural Ethiopia. We find that household-level education is important to the timing of adoption but less crucial to the question of whether a household has ever adopted fertiliser, i.e., early innovators tend to be educated and to be copied by those who adopt later, obscuring the relationship between education and adoption at the household-level. By contrast, site-level education appears not to affect the timing of an innovation’s introduction to the site, but does influence the extent of diffusion. Thus, there are two externality effects: educated farmers are early innovators, providing an example which may be copied by lesseducated farmers; and educated farmers are better able to copy those who innovate first, enhancing diffusion of the new technology more widely within the site.

The voluntary adoption of environmental management systems (EMSs), frequently certified by third-party audits following international standards, has become a vital supplement to mandatory environmental policies based on regulation and legislation. Although there is empirical evidence that both EMS adoption and certification can effectively improve firms’ environmental performance, the impact on their business performance is far from clear. Drawing upon an OECD survey including more than 4000 manufacturing facilities, this paper fills this void by estimating the impact of both EMS adoption and certification on facilities’ business performance using statistical matching techniques. While providing for a didactic summary of matching methods, our results indicate that the pure adoption of EMS without any certification does not enhance facilities’ business performance, the financial performance of certified facilities turns out to be significantly higher.

The diffusion of renewable energy in the power system implies high supply variability. Lacking economically viable storage options, renewable energy integration is possible thanks to the presence of modern mid-merit fossil-based technologies, which act as back-up capacity. This paper discusses the role of modern fossil-based power generation technologies in supporting renewable energy investments. We study the deployment of these two technologies conditional on all other drivers in 26 OECD countries between 1990 and 2013. We show that moving from the first to the third quartile of the distribution of modern fossil technologies is associated with an increase in yearly renewable energy investment of between 6 and 14 kW per thousand people, on average and ceteris paribus. This is a sizeable effect, considering that average yearly renewable capacity addition in our sample are around 12 kW per thousand people. These findings are robust to different econometric specifications, various definitions of modern fossil technologies and are stronger for wind, which is more intermittent and for which the mismatch between supply and demand is more marked. Our analysis points to the substantial indirect costs of renewable energy integration and highlights the complementarity of investments in different generation technologies for a successful decarbonization process.

We use Italian data from the Multipurpose Household Survey to explore how participation in social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook and Twitter affects the most economically relevant aspect of social capital, trust. We account for measures of trust in strangers (often referred to as social trust), trust in neighbours (particularized trust) and trust in the police (institutional trust). We address endogeneity in the use of SNS by exploiting the variation in the availability of broadband for high-speed Internet, which relates to technological characteristics of the pre-existing voice telecommunication infrastructures. We find that all the forms of trust significantly decrease with participation in online networks. We discuss several interpretations of the results in light of the specific features of Internet-mediated social interaction.

Local opinion leaders may play a key role in easing information frictions associated with technology adoption. This paper analyzes the influence of physician investigators who lead clinical trials for new cancer drugs. By comparing diffusion patterns across 21 new cancer drugs, we separate correlated regional demand for new technology from information spillovers. Patients in the lead investigator's region are initially 36% more likely to receive the new drug, but utilization converges within four years. We also find that “superstar ” physician authors, measured by trial role or citation history, have broader influence than less prominent authors.

This paper explores the relationship between job polarization and interindustry wage differentials. Using the U.S. Census and EU KLEMS data, we find that the progress of job polarization between 1980 and 2009 was more evident in industries that initially paid a high wage premium to workers than in industries that did not. With a two-sector neoclassical growth model to highlight the key mechanism, we argue that this phenomenon can be explained as a dynamic response of firms to interindustry wage differentials: firms with a high wage premium seek alternative ways to cut production costs by replacing workers who perform routine tasks with Information, Communication, and Technology (ICT) capital. The replacement of routine workers with ICT capital has become more pronounced as the price of ICT capital has fallen over the past 30 years. As a result, firms that are constrained to pay a relatively high wage premium have experienced slower growth of employmentof routine workers than firms in low-wage industries, which led to heterogeneity in job polarization across industries.

This paper investigates the effect of exporting activities on the innovation strategies of firms in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and UK. It puts forward the hypothesis that the positive effect usually found in the related literature is driven by two main mechanisms. The first is a technological learning effect that allows firms active in international markets to benefit from foreign knowledge spillovers in technologically advanced markets and decrease their research cost for the development of innovations. The second is a foreign demand effect according to which the increase of demand induced by the access to foreign markets increases also the profitability of introducing innovations. The paper uses firm-level information about the export destinations of exporters and creates two indices to proxy the two effects, using respectively foreign R&D intensity and foreign growth of imports of the countries of destination of exports, measured at the sectoral level. The empirical analysis, which takes into account possible endogeneity issues related with the firms’ strategic choice of the markets of destination, shows that the two effects induce the adoption of different innovation strategies: while the technological learning effect increases mainly the incentives to introduce brand new product innovations, the foreign demand effect fosters the adoption of efficiency strategies.

We study the optimal targeting strategy of a planner who seeks to maximize the diffusion of an action in a society where agents imitate successful past behavior of others. The agents face individual decision problems under uncertainty, make reversible adoption choices and interact locally, so that each agent affects only her neighbors. We find that the optimal targeting strategy depends on two parameters: (i) the likelihood of the action being more successful than its alternative and (ii) the planner's patience. More specifically, for an infinitely patient planner, the optimal strategy is to cluster all the targeted agents in one connected group when her preferred action has higher probability of being more successful than its alternative; whereas it is optimal spreading them across the population when this probability is lower. Interestingly, for an impatient planner the optimal targeting strategy is exactly the opposite.

We analyse strategic experimentation in which information arrives through fully revealing, publicly observable “breakdowns.” With hidden actions, there exists a unique equilibrium that involves randomization over stopping times. This randomization induces belief disagreement on the equilibrium path. When actions are observable, the equilibrium is pure, and welfare improves. We analyse the role of policy interventions such as subsidies for experimentation and risk-sharing agreements. We show that the optimal risk-sharing agreement restores the first-best outcome, independent of the monitoring structure.

The Producer Price Index (PPI) for the United States suggests that semiconductor prices have barely been falling in recent years, a dramatic contrast to the rapid declines reported from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s. This slowdown in the rate of decline is puzzling in light of evidence that the performance of microprocessor units (MPUs) has continued to improve at a rapid pace. Over the course of the 2000s, the MPU prices posted by Intel, the dominant producer of MPUs, became much stickier over the chips' life cycle. As a result of this change, we argue that the matched-model methodology used in the PPI for MPUs likely started to be biased after the early 2000s and that hedonic indexes can provide a more accurate measure of price change since then. MPU prices fell rapidly through 2004 on every price measure we present, with the PPI declining at an even quicker pace than the hedonic indexes. However, from 2004 to 2009, our preferred hedonic index fell faster than the PPI, and from 2009 to 2013 the gap widened further, with our preferred index falling at an average annual rate of 42 percent, while the PPI declined at only a 6 percent rate. Given that MPUs currently represent about half of U.S. shipments of semiconductors, this difference has important implications for gauging the rate of innovation in the semiconductor sector.

Our study aims to assess the actual importance of the two main channels via which upstream anti-competitive sector regulations are usually considered to impact productivity growth, i.e. by acting as a disincentive to business investments in R&D and in ICT. We estimate the specific impacts of these two channels and their shares in the total impact as opposed to alternative channels of investments in other forms of intangible capital that we cannot explicitly consider for lack of appropriate data such as improvements in skills, management and organization. To achieve this, we specify an extended production function explicitly relating productivity to R&D and ICT capital as well as to upstream regulations, and we specify two factor demand functions relating R&D and ICT capital to upstream regulations. These relations are estimated on the basis of an unbalanced panel of 15 OECD countries and 13 industries over the period 1987-2007. Confirming the results of previous similar studies, our estimates find that the impact of upstream regulations on total factor productivity can be sizeable, and they provide evidence that a good part of the total impact, though not a predominant one, is transmitted through investments in both R&D and ICT, and particularly the former

In the coming decades, the countries of the South will be facing the aging of the population faster than the countries of the North. This will have long-term economic consequences for the South but also for the North through the changing of international capital flows. To study the latter, we build a simple two-region two-period OLG model, assuming fully integrated financial markets. This allows us to determine the analytical expression of the world interest rate dynamics at general equilibrium and the resulting capital flows accruing to each of the two regions (the North and the South). From there, we analyse how a reduction in either fertility or mortality alters the magnitude of the international capital flows. Contradictory effects are evidenced. To clear up any ambiguity and to study the South's demographic transition, which involves a succession of shocks, we propose numerical simulations. Even if the results stress that the institutional context and technological catching-up may matter, they suggest in a rather general way that the declines in both fertility and mortality tend to reduce the relative capital needs of the Southern economies and consequently their capital inflows. This, in turn, would be beneficial to the North's productive capacity, which should then hold more capital.

In this paper, we document the presence of “technology-induced” trade in France between 1997 and 2007 and assess its impact on consumer welfare. We use the staggered roll-out of broadband internet to estimate its causal effect on the importing behavior of affected firms. Using an event-study design, we find that broadband expansion increases firm-level imports by around 25%. We further find that the “sub-extensive” margin (number of products and sourcing countries per firm) is the main channel of adjustment and that the effect is larger for capital goods. Finally, we develop a model where firms optimize over their import strategy and which yields a sufficient statistics formula for the quantification of the effects of broadband on consumer welfare. Interpreted within this model, our reduced-form estimates imply that broadband internet reduced the consumer price index by 1.7% and that the import-channel, i.e. the enhanced access to foreign goods that is allowed by broadband, accounts for a quarter of that effect.

The incentives to conduct basic or applied research play a central role for economic growth. How does increasing early innovation appropriability affect basic research, applied research, education, and wage inequality? This paper analyzes the macroeconomic effects of patent protection by incorporating a two-stage cumulative innovation structure into a quality-ladder growth model with skill acquisition. We focus on two issues (a) the over-protection vs. the under-protection of intellectual property rights in basic research; (b) the evolution of jurisprudence shaping the bargaining power of the upstream innovators. We show that the dynamic general equilibrium interations may seriously mislead the empirical assessment of the growth effects of IPR policy: stronger protection of upstream innovation always looks bad in the short- and possibly medium-run. We argue that in a common law system an explictly dynamic macroeconomic analysis is appropriate. We also provide a simple "rule of thumb" indicator of the basic researcher bargaining power.

A rich literature links knowledge inputs with innovative outputs. However, most of what is known is restricted to manufacturing. This paper analyzes whether the three aspects involving innovative activity - R&D; innovative output; and productivity - hold for knowledge intensive services. Combining the models of Crepon et al. (1998) and of Ackerberg et al. (2015), allows for causal interpretation of the relationship between innovation output and labor productivity. We find that knowledge intensive services benefit from innovation activities in the sense that these activities causally increase their labor productivity. Moreover, the firm size advantage found for manufacturing in previous studies nearly disappears for knowledge intensive services., CEPA Discussion Papers, 4

This study contributes to the literature on routinization and employment by capturing within- occupation task changes over the period 1980-2010. The main contribution is the measurement of such changes combining two data sources on occupational task content for the United States: the Dictionary of Occupational Titles and the Occupational Information Network. We show that within-occupation task change: i) accounts for 1/3 of the decline in routine-task use; ii) accelerates in the 1990s, decelerates in the 2000s but with significant catching-up; iii) is associated with educational upgrading in several dimensions and iv) allows escaping the employment decline conditional on initial routine-task intensity.

This article investigates the long-term historical impact of missionary activity on the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. On the one hand, missionaries were among the first to invest in modern medicine in a number of countries. On the other hand, Christianity influenced sexual beliefs and behaviors. We build a new geocoded dataset locating Protestant and Catholic missions in the early 20th century, as well as their health investments. Using a number of different empirical strategies to address selection in missionary locations and into health investments, we show that missionary presence has conflicting effects on HIV today. Regions close to historical mission stations exhibit higher HIV prevalence. This negative impact is robust to multiple specifications accounting for urbanization, and we provide evidence that it is specific to STDs. Less knowledge about condom use is a likely channel. On the contrary, among regions historically close to missionary settlements, proximity to a mission with a health investment is associated with lower HIV prevalence nowadays. Safer sexual behaviors around these missions are a possible explanatory channel.

This paper focuses on the development of technology clusters and based on this, on two research questions: What are the preconditions for technology cluster development according to cluster research? And, does the region Mainfranken fulfill the requirements for a technology cluster formation? For this purpose, a qualitative study will be conducted by referring to various theoretical concepts of cluster formation. Due to this, the following determinants of cluster development can be deduced into: the traffic infrastructure and infrastructure component, the cluster environment component, the university component, the state component and the industrial component. The analysis of the parameter value of the separate cluster components shows that the core requirements of technology cluster development in the region of Mainfranken are fulfilled. Nevertheless, it is necessary to improve the infrastructure, the commercial and industrial availability of land and availability of capital to form a successful technology cluster. Within the framework of this paper, the potential of technology cluster development in the field of artificial intelligence could also be analyzed., Dieser Beitrag konzentriert sich auf die Entwicklung von Technologieclustern und basiert auf zwei Forschungsfragen: Was sind die Voraussetzungen für die Entwicklung von Technologieclustern gemäß der Clusterforschung? Und erfüllt die Region Mainfranken die Voraussetzungen für eine Technologieclusterbildung? Zu diesem Zweck wird eine qualitative Studie unter Bezugnahme auf verschiedene theoretische Konzepte der Clusterbildung durchgeführt. Aus diesem Grund können die folgenden Determinanten der Clusterentwicklung abgeleitet werden: die Verkehrsinfrastruktur- und Infrastrukturkomponente, die Clusterumfeldkomponente, die Universitätskomponente, die Staatskomponente und die Branchenkomponente. Die Analyse der Parameterwerte der einzelnen Clusterkomponenten zeigt, dass die Kernanforderungen der Technologieclusterentwicklung in der Region Mainfranken erfüllt sind. Dennoch ist es notwendig, die Infrastruktur, die kommerzielle und industrielle Verfügbarkeit von Land und die Verfügbarkeit von Kapital zu verbessern, um ein erfolgreiches Technologiecluster zu bilden. Im Rahmen der vorliegenden Arbeit konnte darüber hinaus das Potenzial der Technologieclusterentwicklung im Bereich der künstlichen Intelligenz analysiert werden.

International audience; In this paper we use cross-state panel data to show a positive and significant correlation between various measures of innovativeness and top income inequality in the United States over the past decades. Two distinct instrumentation strategies suggest that this correlation (partly) reflects a causality from innovativeness to top income inequality, and the effect is significant: for example, when measured by the number of patent per capita, innovativeness accounts on average across US states for around 17% of the total increase in the top 1% income share between 1975 and 2010. Yet, innovation does not appear to increase other measures of inequality which do not focus on top incomes. Next, we show that the positive effects of innovation on the top 1% income share are dampened in states with higher lobbying intensity. Finally, from cross-section regressions performed at the commuting zone (CZ) level, we find that: (i) innovativeness is positively correlated with upward social mobility; (ii) the positive correlation between innovativeness and social mobility, is driven mainly by entrant innovators and less so by incumbent innovators, and it is dampened in states with higher lobbying intensity. Overall, our findings vindicate the Schumpeterian view whereby the rise in top income shares is partly related to innovation-led growth, where innovation itself fosters social mobility at the top through creative destruction.

Are knowledge flows all alike? Evidence from European regions. Regional Studies. The paper investigates the impact of distance, contiguity and technological proximity on cross-regional knowledge flows by comparing the evidence concerning co-inventorship, applicant–inventor relationships and citation flows. Evidence is found of significant differences across these diverse kinds of knowledge flows for what concerns the role of distance, and the moderating role of contiguity and technological proximity. Moreover, it is shown that border effects may prove crucial in a twofold sense. On the one hand, contiguity between regions belonging to two different countries still plays a moderating role, although weaker as compared with that of within-country contiguity. On the other hand, regions sharing a frontier with a foreign country are more likely to exchange knowledge with this foreign country than other regions which are far from the border.

This paper analyses the potentials of jobs to be offshored or outsourced. We use four waves of the BIBB/BAuA Survey on Qualification and Working Conditions in Germany and employ a large set of potential determinants of offshoring and outsourcing derived from the literature. Applying the datadriven method of principal component analysis, we provide two indicators that measure both the offshoring potentials (cross-country geographical relocation) and the outsourcing potentials (organisational relocation) at the level of jobs, occupations, tasks, or industries. Our results show significant variation in the determinants of both dimensions. In addition to the direct contribution, our paper provides two indicators that can be used to further investigate the economic effects of job offshorability.

This paper studies the effect of top tax rates on inventors' international mobility since 1977. We put special emphasis on “superstar” inventors, those with the most abundant and most valuable patents. We use panel data on inventors from the United States and European Patent Offices to track inventors' locations over time and combine it with international effective top tax rate data. We construct a detailed set of proxies for inventors' counterfactual incomes in each possible destination country including, among others, measures of patent quality and technological fit with each potential destination. Exploiting the differential impact of changes in the top tax rate on inventors of different qualities, we find that superstar top 1% inventors are significantly affected by top tax rates when deciding where to locate. The elasticity to the net-of-tax rate of the number of domestic superstar inventors is relatively small, around 0.03, while the elasticity of the number of foreign superstar inventors is around 1. Inventors who work in multinational companies are more likely to take advantage of tax differentials. On the other hand, if the company of an inventor has a higher share of its research activity in a given country, the inventor is less sensitive to the tax rate in that country.

Recent theories have provided a persuasive account of a key stylized fact of mature economies: the common long-run trends of average real wages and labor productivity, and the ensuing stationarity of functional distribution. Central to these theories is the notion of directed technical change, which claims that a rise in labor costs sparks the adoption of labor-saving innovations. This paper empirically examines a core prediction of these theories, namely that shocks to functional distribution elicit compensatory adjustments in real product wages and labor productivity. Using two disaggregated data-sets of manufacturing industries (EU-Klems and Unido), I find evidence of cointegration and two-way, long-run Granger causality between these two variables. These findings suggest that directed technical change is indeed key for producing stationarity in functional distribution, and they complement the recent empirical literature on distributive cycles and productivity growth. Preliminary evidence from the Unid...

We analyze changes in the skill content of occupations in US four-digit manufacturing industries between 1999 and 2010. Following a >task-based> approach, we elaborate a measure of non-routine skill intensity that captures the effects of industry exposure to both technology and international trade. The article adds to previous literature by focusing on both the determinants of demand for non-routine skills and their effects on industry productivity and wages. The key finding is that import competition from low-wage countries has been a strong driver of demand for non-routine skills during the 2000s. Both technology and trade with low-wage countries are associated with mild cross-industry convergence in skill intensity, while trade with high- and medium-wage countries are at the root of persistent heterogeneity across occupational groups. We also find that higher non-routine skill intensity has had, at best, a modest effect on productivity and wages, except in high-skill occupations., D.C. acknowledges the financial support of the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (RYC-2011-07888).

This research advances the hypothesis that natural land productivity in the past, and its effect on the desirable level of cooperation in the agricultural sector, had a persistent effect on the evolution of social capital, the process of industrialization and comparative economic development across the globe. Exploiting exogenous sources of variations in land productivity across (a) countries; (b) individuals within a country, (c) migrants of different ancestry within a country, and (d) individuals residing in regions within a country, the research establishes that lower level of land productivity in the past is associated with more intense cooperation and higher levels of contemporary social capital and development.

This paper investigates the impact of schools banning mobile phones on student test scores. By surveying schools in four English cities regarding their mobile phone policies and combining it with administrative data, we adopt a difference in differences (DID) strategy, exploiting variations in schools' autonomous decisions to ban these devices, conditioning on a range of student characteristics and prior achievement. We find that student performance in high stakes exams significantly increases post ban, by about 0.07 standard deviations on average. These increases in performance are driven by the lowest-achieving students. This suggests that the unstructured presence of phones has detrimental effects on certain students and restricting their use can be a low-cost policy to reduce educational inequalities.

This paper sets out a formal model to account for the net effect of an exchange rate devaluation on both income elasticities of demand for export and imports and, consequently, on the long-term balance-of-payments constrained growth rate. Such model shows how the exchange rate impacts on the home country non-price competitiveness via changes in the variables which reflect the economic structure such as the income distribution and technological change. It is built upon two basic hypotheses. Firstly, it assumes technological improvements impact positively on the income elasticity of demand for exports and negatively on the income elasticity of demand for imports. Secondly, it assumes here that changes in income distribution have an ambiguous impact on the income elasticities ratio. The model shows that the net impact of a currency devaluation on growth is ambiguous and depends on several structural features.

We present a version of the neoclassical model with an endogenous industry structure. We construct a distribution of firms׳ productivity that implies multiple steady-state equilibria even with an arbitrarily small degree of increasing returns to scale. While the most productive firms operate across all the steady states, in a poverty trap less productive firms operate as well. This results in lower average firm productivity and total factor productivity. The distributions of employment by firm size across steady states are consistent with the empirical observation that poor countries have a higher fraction of employment in small firms than rich countries. Differences in output and total factor productivity across steady states are increasing in the degree of returns to scale, the capital share, and the Frisch elasticity of labor supply.