Results

CentrePiece article

Polarisation is not a myth

Political views shape the creation and spread of technology...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

AI unbound: digital infrastructure, AI adoption, and firm performance

We study how digital infrastructure relaxes constraints on the diffusion and economic impact of artificial intelligence (AI). Using administrative data and a nationally representative enterprise survey from Turkey (2021?...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Technology spillovers, diffusion and rivalry in firm networks

We examine how upstream firms' technology adoption affects the performance and adoption decisions of downstream partners. Using business-to-business data with administrative records on advanced technology adoption, we fi...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization:

Business groups as knowledge-based hierarchies of firms

We provide the first worldwide overview of the patterns of hierarchical differentiation across Business Groups (BGs), highlighting the coexistence of different hierarchical shapes. We show how the different shapes can ar...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

How ICT shapes wages, working conditions, and job satisfaction

We study how the widespread diffusion of ICT affects wages, working conditions, and job satisfaction. We frame our empirical investigation with a model in which ICT can improve both wages and working conditions by increa...Read more...

Journal article

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers:

Finding stars: mapping the geography of the world's scientific elites

This paper presents the first systematic city-level mapping of global scientific talent, analysing the top 200,000 star scientists across 3635 cities worldwide annually between 2019 and 2023. We use a novel Knowledge Gen...Read more...

Chapter

Immigration, diversity and innovation in cities and regions

in A Research Agenda for Migration and Innovation

This chapter investigates the interplay between immigrant diversity and innovation, emphasizing the urban and regional dimensions where these effects are most pronounced. Cities and urban areas are pivotal to the generat...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

Paper tiger? Chinese science and home bias in citations

We investigate the phenomenon of home bias in scientific citations, where researchers disproportionately cite work from their own country. We develop a benchmark for expected citations based on the relative size of count...Read more...

Journal article

Labour Economics:

Human after all: occupations at the core of AI adoption

This paper investigates how firms? occupational structure shapes the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) using matched administrative data on French firms and relying on an instrumental variable Probit model. We ide...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Fighting climate change: international attitudes toward climate policies

This paper explores global perceptions and understanding of climate change and policies, examining factors that influence support for climate action and the impact of different types of information. We conduct large-scal...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economics and Statistics :

The value of managers' export experience: lessons from the Angolan civil war

We investigate how managers help firms grow by entering a new export market. We conduct an event study on the decision to export to Angola using data on Portuguese firms and workers. We evaluate the impact of the presenc...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Technology spillovers, diffusion, and rivalry in firm networks

Quantifying technology adoption, spillovers, and diffusion across firms is crucial for understanding industry dynamics, and in turn countries' growth. This column combines firm-level input-output VAT data from Turkey wit...Read more...

Journal article

Industrial and Corporate Change:

More or the same? Radical, disruptive, discontinuous, and breakthrough innovation

This paper addresses the conceptual ambiguity in the literature on exceptional innovations, labeled ?radical,? ?disruptive,? ?breakthrough,? or ?discontinuous.? A bibliometric analysis of 4407 articles shows that differe...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The role of human capital for AI adoption: evidence from French firms

We leverage a uniquely comprehensive combination of data sources to explore the enabling role of human capital in fostering the adoption of predictive AI systems in French firms. Using a causal estimation approach, we sh...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The new wave? The role of human capital and STEM skills in technology adoption in the UK

Which types of human capital influence the adoption of advanced technologies? We study the skill biased adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT) across two waves in the UK. Specifically, we compare th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade and the end of antiquity

What caused the end of antiquity, the shift of economic activity away from the Mediterranean towards northern Europe? We assemble a large database of coin flows between the 4th and 10th century and use it to document the...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics:

Technology transfer in global value chains

Global value chains create opportunities for North-South technology diffusion. This paper studies technology transfer in value chains when contracts are incomplete and input production technologies are imperfectly exclud...Read more...

Journal article

Annals of Economics and Statistics:

Proximity of firms to scientific production

Following Bergeaud et al. (2022), we construct a new measure of proximity between industrial sectors and public research laboratories. Using this measure, we explore the underlying network of knowledge linkages between s...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economic Studies:

Using disasters to estimate the impact of uncertainty

Uncertainty rises in recessions and falls in booms. But what is the causal relationship? We construct cross-country panel data on stock market returns to proxy for first- and second-moment shocks and instrument these wit...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Proximity of firms to scientific production

Following Bergeaud et al. (2022), we construct a new measure of proximity between industrial sectors and public research laboratories. Using this measure, we explore the underlying network of knowledge linkages between s...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Individual consequences of occupational decline

We assess the career earnings losses that individual Swedish workers suffered when their occupations' employment declined. High-quality data allow us to overcome sorting into declining occupations on various attributes, ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Knowledge spillovers from clean innovation. A tradeoff between growth and climate?

Innovation policy faces a tradeoff between growth and climate objectives when the knowledge spillover externality from clean innovation is low compared to other sectors. To make such a comparison, we use patent data to e...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

From public labs to private firms: magnitude and channels of R&D spillovers

Introducing a new measure of scientific proximity between private firms and public research groups and exploiting a multi-billion euro financing program of academic clusters in France, we provide causal evidence of spill...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Clean technologies for growth and equity

Public investment in developing energy sources that don?t cause climate change is a strategy for economic growth that could also contribute to the UK?s levelling up agenda, says Ralf Martin. His analysis indicates that s...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Knowledge flows from public labs to private firms

How knowledge spillovers operate between academia and private firms remains an open question. Antonin Bergeaud, Arthur Guillouzouic, Emeric Henry and Clement Malgouyres find strong spillovers through the contracting, mob...Read more...

Journal article

Nature Communications:

The effect of Covid certificates on vaccine uptake, health outcomes, and the economy

In the COVID-19 pandemic many countries required COVID certificates, proving vaccination, recovery, or a recent negative test, to access public and private venues. We estimate their effect on vaccine uptake for France, G...Read more...

Journal article

International Journal of Human Computer Studies:

Multitasking while driving: a time use study of commuting knowledge workers to assess current and future uses

Commuting has enormous impact on individuals, families, organizations, and society. Advances in vehicle automation may help workers employ the time spent commuting in productive work-tasks or wellbeing activities. To ach...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Structural change within versus across firms: evidence from the United States

We document the role of intangible capital in manufacturing firms' substantial contribution to non-manufacturing employment growth from 1977-2019. Exploiting data on firms' "auxiliary" establishments, we develop a novel ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

How does working from home during Covid-19 affect what managers do? Evidence from time-use studies

We assess how the sudden and widespread shift to working from home during the pandemic impacted how managers allocate time throughout their working day. We analyze the results from an online time-use survey with data on ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Multitasking while driving: a time use study of commuting knowledge workers to access current and future uses

Commuting has enormous impact on individuals, families, organizations, and society. Advances in vehicle automation may help workers employ the time spent commuting in productive work-tasks or wellbeing activities. To ach...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Knowledge spillovers from clean and emerging technologies in the UK

The UK government has committed to increase R&D support for clean technologies in an effort to meet its net-zero target by 2050. The opportunity cost of such programs crucially depends on the value of knowledge spillover...Read more...

Journal article

Research Policy :

No inventor is an island: social connectedness and the geography of knowledge flows in the US

Do informal social ties connecting inventors across distant places promote knowledge flows between them? To measure informal ties, we use a new and direct index of social connectedness of regions based on aggregate Faceb...Read more...

Journal article

Human-Computer Interaction:

How does working from home during Covid-19 affect what managers do? Evidence from time-use studies

In this research we explore the effects of the forced Work-from-home arrangement during the Covid-19 pandemic on managers. We assess how the sudden and widespread shift to working from home during the pandemic impacted h...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Business groups as knowledge-based hierarchies of firms

Hierarchical differentiation is a cornerstone of the organizing process. In this paper, we do three things. First, exploiting a newly assembled dataset, we provide the first worldwide overview of the patterns of hierarch...Read more...

Journal article

Management Science:

Stars and brokers: knowledge spillovers among medical scientists

This paper estimates the heterogeneity in peer effects among research scientists in terms of network position. I propose a new measure, brokerage degree, that determines the extent to which a scientist depends on a coaut...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

No inventor is an island: social connectedness and the geography of knowledge flows in the US

Do informal social ties connecting inventors across distant places promote knowledge flows between them? To measure informal ties, we use a new and direct index of social connectedness of regions based on aggregate Faceb...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The best versus the rest: divergence across firms during the global productivity slowdown

We document that labor productivity of the globally most productive firms ? the ?frontier? ? has diverged from all other firms ? the ?rest? ? throughout the 2000s. This divergence remains after controlling for capital in...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Threats to scientific progress, past and present

A US boycott of Chinese researchers, as threatened by the Trump administration, could stifle scientific progress and technological innovation. That is the concern of Alessandro Iaria, Carlo Schwarz and Fabian Waldinger, ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Geography, ties and knowledge flows: evidence from citations in mathematics

Using data on academic citations, career and educational histories of mathematicians, and disaggregated distance data for the world's top 1000 math departments, we study how geography and ties affect knowledge flows amon...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Frontier knowledge and scientific production: evidence from the collapse of international science

We show that WWI and the subsequent boycott against Central scientists severely interrupted international scientific cooperation. After 1914, citations to recent research from abroad decreased and paper titles became les...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

Sorting and agglomeration economies in French economics departments

Are agglomeration and peer effects at stake in academic research? To tackle this question, we study how departments? characteristics affect the quantity and quality of academics? publications in economics in France, cont...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The diffusion of knowledge via managers' mobility

Better managers and managerial practices lead to better firm performance. Yet, little is known about what happens when managers move across firms. Does a firm hiring a good manager improve its performance? If yes is ther...Read more...

CentrePiece article

High-speed rail in China

Encouraging innovation is a perennial policy goal ? and one common approach is to promote the adoption of foreign technology. Yatang Lin and colleagues examine the impact of China?s technology transfer policy, which has ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Colocation and knowledge diffusion: evidence from million dollar plants

This paper uses the entry of large corporations into U.S. counties during the 1980s and 1990s to analyse the effect of plant opening on knowledge spillovers to local inventors. We use a difference-in-differences identifi...Read more...

Journal article

Research Policy:

Do inventors talk to strangers? On proximity and collaborative knowledge creation

This paper examines the characteristics of the collaborations between inventors in the United Kingdom (UK) by looking at what types of proximities - geographic, organisational, cognitive, social, and cultural-ethnic - be...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

International technology transfer and domestic innovation: evidence from the high-speed rail sector in China

How does the transfer of advanced technology spur innovation in developing countries? This paper exploits the large-scale introduction of high-speed railway (HSR) technology into China in 2004 as a natural experiment to ...Read more...

Journal article

Water Economics and Policy:

Invention and diffusion of water supply and water efficiency technologies: insights from a global patent dataset

This paper identifies over 50,000 patents filed worldwide in various water-related technologies between 1990 and 2010, distinguishing between those related to availability (supply) and conservation (demand) technologies....Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Knowledge-based hierarchies: using organizations to understand the economy

We argue that incorporating the decision of how to organize the acquisition, use, and communication of knowledge into economic models is essential to understand a wide variety of economic phenomena. We survey the literat...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Wikipedia: the value of open content production

Without the `spillover effects? of open content production, the growth in Wikipedia editing activity between 2002 and 2010 would have been halved. That is the central finding of research by Aleksi Aaltonen and Stephan Se...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Patents and the global diffusion of new drugs

This paper studies how patent rights and price regulation affect how fast new drugs are launched in different countries, using newly constructed data on launches of 642 new drugs in 76 countries for the period 1983-2002,...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Education and health knowledge: evidence from UK compulsory schooling reforms

We investigate if there is a causal link between education and health knowledge using data from the 1984/85 and 1991/92 waves of the UK Health and Lifestyle Survey (HALS). Uniquely, the survey asks respondents what they ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Dynamic selection: an idea flows theory of entry, trade and growth

This paper develops an idea flows theory of trade and growth with heterogeneous firms. New firms learn from incumbent firms, but the diffusion technology ensures entrants learn not only from frontier technologies, but fr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Quantifying spillovers in open source content production: evidence from Wikipedia

Using detailed edit-level data over eight years across a large number of articles on Wikipedia, we find evidence for a positive spillover effect in editing activity. Cumulative past contributions, embodied by the current...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Do Inventors Talk to Strangers? On Proximity and Collaborative Knowledge Creation

This paper investigates how physical, organisational, institutional, cognitive, social, and ethnic proximities between inventors shape their collaboration decisions. Using a new panel of UK inventors and a novel identifi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

What are the Channels for Technology Sourcing? Panel Data Evidence from German Companies

Innovation processes within corporations increasingly tap into international technology sources, yet little is known about the relative contribution of different types of innovation channels. We investigate the effective...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Does management matter? Evidence from India

A long-standing question is whether differences in management practices across firms can explain differences in productivity, especially in developing countries where these spreads appear particularly large. To investiga...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Brain Drain or Brain Gain? Technology Diffusion and Learning On-the-job

This paper develops a theory of technology transfer when technology is embodied in human capital and learning requires on-the-job communication between managers and workers. Patterns of knowledge diffusion depend on wher...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Bright Side of Social Capital: How 'Bridging' Makes Italian Provinces More Innovative

Social capital has remained relatively underexplored in innovation literature. Existing studies have failed to reach a consensus on its impact on local innovative performance: some empirical analyses emphasize a positive...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does Management Matter? Evidence from India

A long-standing question in social science is to what extent differences in management cause differences in firm performance. To investigate this we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We pro...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Task-Based Approach to Organization: Knowledge, Communication and Structure

We bridge a gap between organizational economics and strategy research by developing a task-based approach to analyze organizational knowledge, process and structure, and deriving testable implications for the relation b...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Spreading the Word: Geography, Policy and Knowledge Spillovers

Using new data on citations to university patents and scientific publications, we study how geography affects university knowledge spillovers. Citations to patents decline sharply with distance up to about 150 miles and ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Impact of University Research on Corporate Patenting

This paper analyses the association between the number of patenting manufacturing firms and the quantity and quality of relevant university research across UK postcode areas. We show that different measures of research `...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Stars and Comets: An Exploration of the Patent Universe

The analysis of patent and citation data has become a popular source of evidence on localized knowledge spillovers and innovation. Nevertheless, an aspect has been overlooked: the patent distribution across inventors is ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Is Distance Dying at Last? Falling Home Bias in Fixed Effects Models of Patent Citations

We examine the ?home bias? of international knowledge spillovers as measured by the speed of patent citations (i.e. knowledge spreads slowly over international boundaries). We present the first compelling econometric evi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

An R&D-Based Model of Multi-Sector Growth

We develop a multi-sector general equilibrium model in which productivity growth is driven by the production of sector-specific knowledge. In the model, we find that long run differences in total factor productivity grow...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Basic Research and Sequential Innovation

The commercial value of basic knowledge depends on the arrival of follow-up developments mostly from outside the boundaries of the inventing firm. Private returns would depend on the extent the inventing firm internalize...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Catching a Wave: the Adoption of Voice and High Commitment Workplace Practices in Britain: 1984-1998

In this paper we treat workplace voice and systems of high-commitment human resource management (HCHRM) as technological innovations in order to account for the uneven diffusion patterns observed across establishments. U...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Foreign Ownership and Productivity: New Evidence from the Service Sector and the R&D Lab

This paper examines the relationship between foreign ownership and productivity, paying particular attention to two issues neglected in the existing literature ? the role of multinationals in service sectors and the impo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Productivity Convergence and Foreign Ownership at the Establishment Level

This paper investigates whether there is convergence in Total Factor Productivity towards the technological frontier at the establishment level. We find convergence to the frontier is statistically and quantitatively imp...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Digital Goods and the New Economy

Digital goods are bitstrings, sequences of 0s and 1s, which have economic value. They are distinguished from other goods by five characteristics: digital goods are nonrival, infinitely expansible, discrete, aspatial, and...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Matching Demand and Supply in a Weightless Economy: Market-Driven Creativity With and Without IPRs

Many cultural products have the same nonrival nature as scientific knowledge. They therefore face identical difficulties in creation and dissemination. One traditional view says market failure is endemic: societies toler...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Spatial Agglomeration Dynamics

This paper develops a model of economic growth and activity locating endogenously on a 3-dimensional featureless global geography. The same economic forces influence simulataneously growth, convergence, and spatial agglo...Read more...