There is continuing debate about what explains cooperation and self-sacrifice in nature and in particular in humans. This paper suggests a new way to think about this famous problem. I argue that, for an evolutionary biologist as well as a quantitative social scientist, the triangle of two...

This research suggests that a Darwinian evolution of entrepreneurial spirit played a significant role in the process of economic development and the dynamics of inequality within and across societies. The study argues that entrepreneurial spirit evolved non-monotonically in the course of human...

This paper studies the interplay between left-handedness and economic development. To explain the decline and subsequent recovery of left-handedness observed over the last few centuries in the Western world, we propose a theory in which economic development influences the prevalence of...

While the extant innovation literature has provided extensive evidence of the so-called "demand-pull" effect, the possible diverse impact of demand evolution on product vs process innovation activities has not been yet investigated. This paper develops a formal model predicting a larger inducing...

Previous empirical literature - mainly cross-sectional - has tested the demand-pull hypothesis and found that overall, evidence does not conflict with the idea that innovation may be driven by output. Using a balanced panel of 216 Italian manufacturing firms over the 1995-2000 period, and...

This paper discusses the relationship between a company's investment in innovation and its success in introducing new product and/or process innovations. In doing so, this analysis departs from the standard approach which puts forward a homogenous R&D-based knowledge production function by...

In earlier work (Bénabou, Ticchi and Vindigni 2013) we uncovered a robust negative association between religiosity and patents per capita, holding across countries as well as US states, with and without controls. In this paper we turn to the individual level, examining the relationship between...

This paper explores how value-chain governance affects the innovation performance of suppliers of intermediate products. We take advantage of a unique dataset of Italian firms to identify governance regimes along suppliers’ technological capabilities and the level of explicit coordination in...

Using our own data on Artificial Intelligence publications merged with Burning Glass vacancy data for 2007-2019, we investigate whether online vacancies for jobs requiring AI skills grow more slowly in U.S. locations farther from pre-2007 AI innovation hotspots. We find that a commuting zone...

In this paper, we analyze how kinship among family members affects intergenerational cooperation in a public good game. 165 individuals from 55 families, comprising three generations (youths, parents, and grandparents), play a public good game in three different treatments: one in which three...