John Van Reenen sketches the evolution of CEP research on the drivers of productivity growth - and its impact on policies to foster competition.

University research provides valuable inputs to industrial innovation. It is therefore not surprising that private sector firms increasingly seek direct access through funding public R&D. This development, however, spurred concerns about possible negative long-run effects on scientific...

This paper investigates whether engagement in consulting activities has a significant impact on the research performance of academic scientists. The study relies on a sample of 2678  individual faculty, from five Spanish universities, who have been recipients of publicly funded grants or have...

M-Pesa is a mobile phone based money transfer system in Kenya which grew at a blistering pace following its inception in 2007. We examine how M-Pesa is used as well as its economic impacts. Analyzing data from two waves of individual data on financial access in Kenya, we find that increased use...

This paper studies the patterns and key determinants of staged economic development. We construct a two-sector dynamic general equilibrium model populated with one-period lived non-overlapping generations, featuring endogenous enhancement in modern technology and endogenous accumulation of labor...

This paper studies patterns of technological change under two scenarios. In Scenario I, a distorted government is open to the influence of producers' collective action, while in Scenario II a benevolent government operates to maximize national income. The paper draws attention to the role that...

Increasing the renewable energy share in national energy mix remains one of the major energy policy goals across many economies. This paper assesses the roles and potentials of renewable energy sources in less-developed economies while citing Nepal as an example. Renewable energy has a...

The causes of the Protestant Reformation have long been debated. This paper attempts to revive and econometrically test the theory that the spread of the Reformation is linked to the spread of the printing press. The proposed causal pathway is that the printing press permitted the ideas of the...

The question of how agricultural research can best be used for developmental purposes is a topic of some debate in developmental circles. The idea that this is simply a question of better transfer of ideas from research to farmers has been largely discredited. Agricultural innovation is a...

Knowledge brokering has been explored in the innovation literature to understand how different innovation tasks are organised toward technological development. This paper reflects upon the role of different organisations as knowledge brokers in regulatory policy processes towards putting...