Government funding of innovation can have a significant impact not only on the rate of technical change, but also on its direction. In this paper, we examine the role that government grants and government departments played in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), an emergent general...

Formal, government-driven technology standards developing organisations (SDOs) traditionally serve as platforms for compromise between existing national standards. In the past decade, the recognition of the driving role of SDOs in innovation has made them surface into the public debate. The...

As the online advertising market has grown, issues such as high volume of ads, highly personalised and targeted ads, the role of algorithmic biases, lack of transparency of ad placement, and complex financial flows in the ad tech supply chain have received increased attention in academic and...

We discuss recent work evaluating the role of the government in shaping the economy during the long 19th century, a practice we refer to as industrial policy. We show that states deployed a vast variety of different policies aimed at, primarily, but not exclusively, fostering industrialization....

Die Förderung von Clustern und Netzwerken ist zu einem zentralen Instrument der Innovationspolitik der alten wie der neuen Industrieländer geworden. Sie gründet sich auf die Beobachtung, dass technologische Fortschritte in der Wissensgesellschaft zunehmend auf dem Zusammenwirken von...

All advanced industrialized societies face the problem of air pollution produced by motor vehicles. In spite of striking improvements in internal combustion engine technology, air pollution in most urban areas is still measured at levels determined to be harmful to human health. Throughout the...

As building-integrated photovoltaic (PV) solutions can meet around one-third of electricity demand in Germany and China, both countries are interested in exploring this potential. PV technologies have demonstrated significant price reductions, but large-scale global application of PV requires...

This paper studies the drivers of business funded and performed R&D in a panel of 14 OECD countries since 1981. More specifically, we investigate the effects of public R&D related policies and wage formation. Following Pesaran (Econometrica, 2006) and Kapetanios et al. (Journal of Econometrics,...

Technology to recover uranium from seawater may act as a potential backstop on the production cost of uranium in a growing international nuclear industry. Convincing proof of the existence of an effective expected upper limit on the resource price would have a strong effect on decisions relating...

According to the memorandum entitled “Microelectronics 2000”, the Japanese and American lead in semi-conductor technology threatens not only the existence of a number of European firms but the prosperity of all the European economies. It therefore concludes that if Europe is not to be at the...