Recent theories of the Long Divergence between Middle Eastern and Western European economies focus on Middle Eastern (over-)reliance on religious legitimacy, use of slave soldiers, and persistence of restrictive proscriptions of religious (Islamic) law. These theories take as exogenous the...

To what extent can technological advances in the production of capital account for the recent, worldwide decline in the labor income share? We pose two challenges to the automation narrative: first, estimates of the elasticity of substitution (EOS) between capital and labor tend to fall below or...

This paper analyzes the impact of internet adoption on labor productivity in Peruvian micro and small manufacturing firms over the period 2011-2013. Instrumental variables estimates show that internet adoption: (i) increases firms' labor productivity; (ii) reallocates employment away from...

The recent deployment of fibre-optic submarine cables (SMCs) in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) raised the prospects for the digital economy expansion and the whole sub-continent take-off, but also exposed countries and populations to new sources of vulnerability. This paper provides empirical evidence...

Access to information may represent an important barrier to learning about and ultimately transferring to 4-year colleges for low-income community college students. This paper explores the role that access to information technology, in particular, plays in enhancing, or possibly detracting from,...

We empirically examine the determinants of adoption of information technology by primary healthcare clinics using a large sample of physician clinics from several States in the U.S. Ours is one of the first studies to intensively investigate primary care clinics. These clinics are important as...

I use data from the World Input-Output Database and show that trade in information technologies (IT) has a significant contribution to the growth in foreign intermediate goods in the 2001-2014 period. China has strongly contributed to the rise in trade in IT and has become one of the major...

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...

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 study examines the influence of information constraints on firms' efficiency in using digital technologies, focusing on business websites. Through two natural field experiments in the UK, we provide firms with benchmarked performance information on their websites. The experimental designs...