We study the role of institutional development as a causal mechanism of history affecting current economic performance. Several indicators capturing different dimensions of early development in 1500 AD are used to remove the endogenous component of the variations in institutions. These...

We study the role of institutional development as a causal mechanism of history affecting current economic performance. Several indicators capturing different dimensions of early development in 1500 AD are used to remove the endogenous component of the variations in institutions. These...

This paper documents a positive relationship between labor-friendly institutions and investment in industrial robots in a sample of advanced economies. Institutions explain a substantial proportion of cross-country variation in automation. The relationship between institutions and robots is...

The utilisation of Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT) and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technologies has started to demonstrate its impact across several domains. The swift shift and widespread implementation of efficient artificial intelligence (AI) present distinct...

The utilisation of Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT) and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technologies has started to demonstrate its impact across several domains. The swift shift and widespread implementation of efficient artificial intelligence (AI) present distinct...

There is an emerging consensus among macro-economists that differences in technology across countries accounts for the major differences in per-capita GDP and the wages of workers with similar skills across countries. Accounting for differences in technology levels across countries thus can go a...

There are large differences in income per capita across countries. Growth accounting finds that a large part of the differences comes from the differences in total factor productivity (TFP). This paper explores whether barrier to entry is an important factor for the cross-country differences in...

This paper analyzes the decision of a group of specialized workers to form a guild and block the adoption of a new technology that does not require their specialized input. The theory predicts an inverted-U relation between guilds and market size: for small markets, firm profits are insufficient...

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...

Does the successful deployment of digital technologies require complementary investment in skills? We conducted a pilot survey to investigate. The survey elicited information on whether the firm was adopting one of the three digital technologies of interest (AI, robotics, big data), provided...