This paper empirically tests the hypothesis that landed elites may block technological change and economic development if they fear that they will lose future political power (Acemoglu and Robinson (2002, 2006, and 2012). It exploits a plausible exogenous change in the distribution of political...

We analyze investment decisions when information is costly, with and without delegation to an agent. We use a rational-inattention model and compare it with a canonical signal-extraction model. We identify three "investment conditions". In "sour" conditions, no information is acquired and no...

Our interest in writing this article is to create a bridge between the scholarly and academic research on technological innovation and a private sector, for-profit business model that implements the ideas on innovation and entrepreneurship, primarily in metro regional economies.This paper...

Danish firms are close to the technological frontier compared to other OECD countries, making the introduction of new – potentially disruptive – technologies key to boost productivity growth. Despite a high level of digitalisation and good framework conditions, aggregate productivity growth...

Modern data and information technologies are having a profound impact on financial services and opening new frontiers in regulation. This article explores the deployment of technology to embed regulatory objectives within the management and decision-making processes of financial firms....

The "just-so" happy story told by global trade proponents that promised that the loss of manufacturing jobs would be made up by the increase in "service sector" jobs is not supported by the BDS data, and it is just now dawning on state government officials that there is something seriously wrong...

Our interest in writing this article is to create a bridge between the scholarly and academic research on technological innovation and a private sector, for-profit business model that implements the ideas on innovation and entrepreneurship, primarily in metro regional economies. In this column,...

This paper provides new evidence on the relationship between innovation, competition and distance to the technology frontier, using enterprise surveys from 40 developing and transition countries. Different from previous empirical studies, the distance to frontier is measured by a firm's...

We study the effect of railroad access on urban population growth. Using GIS techniques, we match triennial population data for roughly 1,000 cities in nineteenth-century Prussia to georeferenced maps of the German railroad network. We find positive short- and long-term effects of having a...

We build a directed technical change model of the British Industrial Revolution where one intermediate goods sector uses a fixed renewable energy (“wood”) quantity, and another uses coal at a fixed price. With a high enough elasticity of substitution between the two goods in producing final...