While economic factors in directed technical and scientific change have been widely studied, the role of teacher-directed scientific change has received little attention. This paper studies teacher-directed scientific change for one of the largest changes in the direction of research, the...

This paper studies the global synchronicity of technology and its impact on the economy. We employ dynamic factor analysis to decompose patent data in different digital technologies for various countries into global and country-specific factors. Our findings confirm the existence of global and...

We study the impacts of risk and ambiguity aversion on the adoption of new technologies, specifically genetically modified (GM) corn and soy seeds. We conduct experiments measuring risk and ambiguity aversion with Midwestern grain farmers. Risk aversion has little impact on the timing of...

Common wisdom in economics asserts that technological innovations in the production process of goods increase their supply and the demand for their inputs. We demonstrate that is not always necessarily the case. Specifically, we show that an improvement in the production technology of an...

In this paper, we aim to bring the debate on the global productivity slowdown – which has largely been conducted from a macroeconomic perspective – to a more micro-level. We show that a particularly striking feature of the productivity slowdown is not so much a lower productivity growth at...

We propose a novel model of knowledge discovery shedding light on the emergence of General Purpose Technologies (GPTs), the process which has been largely neglected in the literature on technological change. We demonstrate that GPTs emerge only when certain conditions with regard to the...