Digitalisation can be described as a sequence of technology and supply shocks which affect the economy through employment and labour markets, productivity and output, and competition and market structure. This paper focuses on how digitalisation - the process of diffusion of digital technologies...

Economic behavior strives for efficiency. Therefore, also evolving network structures should be a result of such a goal-oriented behavior. Traditionally, networks were assumed to be only temporary phenomena, since the prevailing organizational forms that comply with the efficiency postulate are...

In this paper I propose a novel abstract mechanism for the creation and diffusion of knowledge and use an agent based modelling approach to explore it. The mechanism takes into account the relation between the phenomena that agents attempt to explain and the stocks of knowledge available in a...

Technological change is transforming Ireland’s economic structures, leading to new jobs and innovative products that benefit consumers. Adoption of new technologies by businesses has been high relative to many other OECD economies, but it has been uneven across industries and the impact on...

This paper analyzes the effects of new business formation on industry growth. Dynamic panel techniques are used to test two hypotheses. First, does hit-andrun competition secure efficiency in an industry? Second, do innovative startups lead to amplified innovations by diminishing the knowledge...

Novel early stage ideas face uncertainty on the expertise needed to elaborate them, which creates a need to circulate them widely to find a match. Yet as information is not excludable, shared ideas may be stolen, reducing incentives to innovate. Still, in idea-rich environments inventors may...

This paper investigates the role of social learning in the diffusion of a new agricultural technology in Ghana. We use unique data on farmers communication patterns to define each individual s information neighborhood, the set of others from whom he might learn. Our empirical strategy is to test...

I show that malaria misdiagnosis, common in resource-poor settings, decreases the expected effectiveness of an important new therapy - since only a fraction of treated individuals have malaria - and reduces the rate of learning via increased noise. Using pilot program data from Tanzania, I...

This paper proposes a model that explains both recently documented facts about the decline of disruptive innovation and the decline in productivity growth as the result of large firms trying to monopolize technologies by poaching inventors from disruptive activities. To come to this conclusion,...

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...