Showing 1 - 10 of 692
Well functioning Markets for Technology (MFT) allow inventors to sell their inventions to others that may derive more value from them. We argue that the growing reliance on science in inventions enhances MFT. In addition to higher quality inventions, reliance on science may enhance gains from...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012496087
In this paper, we develop a model of technology adoption and economic growth in which households optimally obtain either a concept-based, general' education or a skill-specific, vocational' education. General education is more costly to obtain, but enables workers to operate new technologies...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012469295
This paper documents a stylized fact not well appreciated in the literature. The Third World has been undergoing an emigration life cycle since the 1960s, and, except for Africa, emigration rates have been level or even declining since a peak in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The current...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012463862
The COVID-19 pandemic has upended health and living standards around the world. This article provides an interim overview of these effects, with a particular focus on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Economists have explained how the pandemic is likely to have differential consequences...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012660017
This paper examines technology sophistication in establishments. To comprehensively measure technology sophistication, we create a grid that covers key business functions and the technologies used to conduct them. Analyzing data from over 21,000 establishments in 15 countries, we find that the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10015195003
Many technologies used by the LDCs are developed in the OECD economies, and as such are designed to make optimal use of the skills of these richer countries' workforces. Due to differences in the supply of skills, some of the tasks performed by skilled workers in the OECD economies will be...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012471932
Even though teams have become the dominant mode of knowledge production, little is known regarding how they divide work among their members. Conceptualizing knowledge production as a process involving a number of functional activities, we first develop a conceptual framework to study the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012456434
We elaborate a model of the incentives of scientists to perform activities of control and criticism when these activities, just like the production of novel findings, are costly, and we study the strategic interaction between these incentives. We then use the model to assess policies meant to...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012457523
We analyze the joint dynamics of religious beliefs, scientific progress and coalitional politics along both religious and economic lines. History offers many examples of the recurring tensions between science and organized religion, but as part of the paper's motivating evidence we also uncover...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012457561
The emergence of novelty, especially of new categories of people and organizations, is undertheorized in the social sciences. Some social worlds are more hospitable to novel introductions or exogenous perturbations than others. Explaining this relative "poisedness" is essential to understanding...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012457657