The Indian state of Punjab, which initially benefited greatly from the Green Revolution, has suffered from a dramatic rise in agrarian suicides for several decades. We use a carefully constructed sample of over one thousand farmers in the epicenter, and build a three-stage model of agricultural...

This paper examines the post-War Summer and Winter Olympic Games in order to determine the economic and political determinants of national participation, of female participation in particular, and of success at the Games (i.e., medal counts). Compared to the Summer Games, Winter participation...

The economics literature clearly shows that the transmission of knowledge diminishes with physical distance, a factor contributing to industrial clustering. This paper investigates how those distances have stretched over time. We measure the physical distance between collaborating inventors, as...

While it is clear that there has been a "regional inversionʺ in American patent activity over the past 25 years (i.e. relative rise of the Northwest and Southwest at the expense of the traditional invention hotbeds of the Northeast and Midwest), the reason is still open to speculation....

Using patent citation data for the U.S., we test whether knowledge spillovers in biotechnology are sensitive to distance. Controlling for self-citation by inventor, assignee and examiner, cohort-based regression analysis shows that spillovers are local but that distance is becoming less...

We model the diffusion of economic knowledge using an epidemiological model of susceptible, exposed, infected, and recovered populations (SEIR). Treating bibliographic citations as evidence of contagion, we estimate the coefficients of a four-equation system simultaneously for each of 759...

This paper tests whether geocaching, a real-world treasure hunt activity using GPS devices and clues provided by other participants, can be modeled as an addictive pursuit. Using over 36 million online activity logs posted by more than 675,000 users in 2010, we find strong evidence that the...

This paper examines the location of innovations within solar technology, using U.S. patent citation data to trace their diffusion over time. Knowledge clustering is clearly present. We employ multivariate left-censored Tobit regression analysis to control for identifiable factors, to examine...