While the worldwide spread of smartphones continues, developing countries have become important markets for these devices. Smartphones’ independence of landline networks qualifies them for communication and Internet access in rural areas of developing countries. Drawing upon rural Southeast...

We develop a new concept of rural technology diffusion influenced by labor mobility and business relations. The technology gain effect of labor mobility increases technology diffusiveness, whereas the technology drain effect decreases it. The concept is applied to survey data from the Mekong...

This paper studies the peer effect of iPhone adoptions in China. We use a unique data set of iPhone adoption records from a provincial capital city in China, in a span of over four years starting from iPhone's first introduction to mainland China. We construct a social network using six month's...

Most existing empirical work on technology diffusion assumes technologies to remain constant throughout the diffusion process. However, many consumer technologies improve significantly over time. Using data on the characteristics of new mobile handsets over a ten-year period and controlling for...

This paper presents a descriptive analysis on the ownership of different types of technology - both agricultural machinery and information technology - within households in rural areas of Vietnam. We find that there has been little development in the ownership of agricultural machinery, but a...

This paper develops a method to estimate and simulate the adoption of a network good. I estimate demand for mobile phones as a function of individuals’ social networks, coverage, and prices, using transaction data from nearly the entire network of Rwandan mobile phone subscribers at the time,...

The use of mobile phones in poverty reduction and development has ignited much interest over the past decade. To take advantage of the rapid expansion of mobile phones in developing countries, businesses, government agencies and non-governmental organisations are increasingly turning their...

This study was prepared by Nina Czernich while she was working with the Ifo Institute for Economic Research.It was completed in December 2010 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. The study addresses the question whether the emergence of...

In this paper we study two closely related issues. First, the role of technology heterogeneity and diffusion in the convergence of GDP per worker observed across the European regions, in the absence of data on regional TFP. Second, the spatial pattern of the observed regional heterogeneity in...

Skill-biased technical change has occupied empirical economists for much of the 90s. However, the empirical literature has not progressed much beyond observing a positive correlation between technology indicators and demand shifts. Two hypotheses on the root causes of skill biases in technical...