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...

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'...

Opportunities and risks are twins. There are few to deny the opportunities of global networks in general and of the Internet in particular. But many fear for the concomitant risks, or what they perceive as a risk. Racists speech, pornography and personality profiling rank highest in public...

This research explores the economic causes and consequences of language structures. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that variations in pre-industrial geographical characteristics that were conducive to higher returns to agricultural investment, gender gaps in agricultural...

This research explores the cultural origins of observed differences in the strength of patent rights across countries. The analysis establishes empirically that pairwise differences in patent rights strength between countries are associated with their cultural differences relative to the United...

Although the significance of international corporate communications is growing rapidly, systematic understanding of this field is underdeveloped. This paper illustrates the status quo in this area, proposes an heuristic analytical grid and considers the future of cross border corporate...

Given the quality of the available data on Internet access across several countries, it is necessary to evaluate alternative measures to assess the effect of Internet access on economic outcomes. The research at hand builds up on an earlier paper, which introduced a novel measure of Internet...

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 research explores the persistent effect of the Neolithic Revolution on the evolution of life expectancy in the course of human history. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that the onset of the Neolithic Revolution and the associated rise in infectious diseases triggered...