A growing literature points to the effectiveness of leveraging social interactions and nudges to spur adoption of pro-social behaviors. This study investigates a large-scale behavioral intervention designed to actively leverage social learning and peer interactions to encourage adoption of...

Does access to information and communication technologies (ICT) increase innovation? We examine this question by exploiting the staggered adoption of BITNET across U.S. universities in the 1980s. BITNET, an early version of the Internet, enabled e-mail-based knowledge exchange and collaboration...

This policy note investigates whether the current level of public support to environment-friendly technologies is sufficient to allow European countries to respond to the multiple challenges posed by climate change and other environmental concerns. We first lay out the justifications for...

Adopting disruptive technologies for decarbonizing hard-to-abate industrial sectors requires experimentation through demonstration (pilot) projects. However, from an economic perspective, the potential long-term benefits and the difficulties in designing relevant public policies are not...

Using data from 11 main manufacturing industries in 17 OECD countries, this paper empirically investigates the determinants of cross-country differences in the persistence of productivity differentials Specifically, we focus on the effects of product market structure and technology diffusion. It...

To analyze the impact of labor scarcity on technology adoption and innovation, this study uses the differential spread of cholera across France in 1832, 1849 and 1854, before the transmission mode of this disease was understood. The results suggest that a larger share of cholera deaths in the...

In unavoidable traffic accidents, autonomous vehicles (AVs) face the dilemma of protecting either the passenger(s) or third parties. Recent studies show that most people prefer AVs following a utilitarian approach by minimizing total harm. At the same time, however, they would adopt an AV only...

This article tests the effects of fuel economy and greenhouse gas emission standards on the direction of innovation, in particular on breakthrough technologies in the automotive industry. We develop an intuitive measure of standard stringency that captures the policy's most important features...

We study whether technology gains in sectors related to Information and Communications Technology (ICT) increase productivity in the rest of the economy. To separate exogenous gains in ICT from other technological progress, we use the relative price of ICT goods and services in a structural VAR...

We study the effect of technological progress on the optimal transition to a renewable energy-fueled world economy. We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model where energy is used as an input in production and can come from fossil or renewable sources. Both require the use of capital, which...