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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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011528503
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'...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014068758
Beliefs in witchcraft, or the ability of certain people to intentionally cause harm via supernatural means, have been documented across societies all over the world. Extensive ethnographic research on this phenomenon over the past century explored the many roles of witchcraft beliefs in...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013217421
We propose a new history-friendly approach to evolutionary socio-economic dynamics based around competition between five ‘utopias', as central ideas about which to order society: capitalism, socialism, democracy, nature, and nationalism (Montgomery and Chirot 2015). In our model, citizens...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013010180
Drawing on macro and micro-economic theory, this paper expands the literature by examining the role of culture, values, religion, wealth, rule of law, governance and accounting on corruption. Using a panel of 75 countries, I find evidence that countries with Civil German law have better control...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014210447
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014059525
This paper outlines a suggestion for a profitable, post-Gutenberg publishing model, one that puts bloggers at its centre. It avoids the chief risk of implementing pay-for-content plans, which is reducing site traffic, thereby reducing publishers’ attractiveness to advertisers. Its pay-to-own...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014199328
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013250768
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012906514
We discuss the two-way link between culture and economic growth. We present a model of endogenous technical change where growth is driven by the innovative activity of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is risky and requires investments that affect the steepness of the lifetime consumption profile....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014025610