This research explores the effects of culture on technological diffusion and economic development. It shows that culture's direct effects on development and barrier effects to technological diffusion are, in general, observationally equivalent. In particular, using a large set of measures of...

This research explores the effects of culture on technological diffusion and economic development. It shows that culture's direct effects on development and barrier effects to technological diffusion are, in general, observationally equivalent. In particular, using a large set of cultural...

This research explores the effects of culture on technological diffusion and economic development. It shows that culture's direct effects on development and barrier effects to technological diffusion are, in general, observationally equivalent. In particular, using a large set of measures of...

Countries around the world are increasingly concerned as to whether the adoption of broadband technology by their respective citizens is sufficient to support economic growth and social development. Unfortunately, such concerns are often expressed in terms of where a country ranks among its...

Deployment of broadband, particularly, FTTx, is now one of major policy objectives in many countries, including Japan, Korea, and the U.S., for example. The U.S. announced a National Broadband Plan which aimed at providing 100 million households with access to 100 Mbps broadband services by...

In many industries, including telecommunications, a government decision on a standard is needed for the society to reap the benefits from the diffusion of new goods. Delays induced by regulatory bodies either in standard choice or its implementation can be extremely costly. I study governments'...

Factors determining the diffusion of digital mobile telephony across developed and developing countries are studied with the aid of a Gompertz model. After controlling for other factors, the speed of diffusion per se is not significantly different between the two groups of countries. Standards...

A country’s human capital and economic productivity increasingly depend on the Internet due to its expanding role in providing information and communications. This has prompted a search for ways to increase Internet adoption and narrow its disparity across countries – the global “digital...

This paper models the welfare consequences of social fragmentation arising from technological advance. We start from the premise that technological progress falls primarily on market-traded commodities rather than prosocial relationships, since the latter intrinsically require the expenditure of...

Why do some societies fail to adopt more efficient political and economic institutions in response to changing economic conditions? And why do such conditions sometimes generate conservative ideological backlashes and, at other times, progressive social and political movements? We propose an...