In recent years, emerging market economy (EME) central banks have increasingly engaged in projects related to central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). In a novel survey focusing on EME efforts, we find that the stage of their engagement – research, pilot or launch – varies according to...

We live in exciting times for governance. Large and powerful institutions used to come in only a few standardized types, such as nation-states and commercial corporations. But the advent of distributed organizations, built on computer code and fueled by digital cash, has supercharged the...

FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) has taken the world by storm in the last decade. The emergence of FLOSS has been exemplified by the rapid rise of the GNU/Linux operating system, which has made inroads in computer systems ranging from supercomputers to handheld devices and mobile phones....

In only a few years, central banks have rapidly ramped up research and development of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). A growing body of economic research is informing central banks’ efforts, often focusing on the “reserves for all” aspect of CBDCs for retail use. However, CBDCs...

Strategic patenting is widely believed to raise the costs of innovating, especially in industries characterised by cumulative innovation. This paper studies the effects of strategic patenting on Ramp;D, patenting and market value in the computer software industry. We focus on two key aspects:...

Employee referrals are a very common means by which firms hire new workers. Past work suggests that workers hired via referrals often perform better than non-referred workers, but we have little understanding as to why. In this paper, we demonstrate that this is primarily because referrals allow...

Although SOA development and service identification are widely discussed among academics and practitioners alike, little is known about how they are performed in practice. Thus, this paper investigates how SOA development and service identification work in real-life projects. An explorative...

Does access to information and communication technologies (ICT) increase innovation? We examine this question by exploiting the staggered adoption of BITNET across U.S. universities in the 1980s. BITNET, an early version of the Internet, enabled e-mail-based knowledge exchange and collaboration...

We study an endogenous growth model where a profit-motivated R and D sector coexists with the introduction of free blueprints invented by philanthropists. These goods are priced at marginal cost, contrary to proprietary ones which are produced by a monopoly owned by the inventor. We show that...