Expansion in mobile phone coverage has improved access to information throughout the developing world, particularly within sub-Saharan Africa. The existing evidence suggests that information technology has improved market efficiency and reduced consumer prices for certain commodities. There are...

Only a few years ago the conventional wisdom predicted that globalization would render the demise of the region as a meaningful unit of economic analysis. Yet the obsession of policy-makers around the globe to 'create the next Silicon Valley' reveals the increased importance of geographic...

Whether diversity or specialization of economic activity better promotes technological change and subsequent economic growth has been the subject of a heated debate in the economics literature. The purpose of this paper is to consider the effect of the composition of economic activity on...

This paper sheds light on the questions, Why does knowledge spill over? and How does knowledge spill over? The answer to these questions lies in the incentives confronting scientists to appropriate the expected value of their knowledge considered in the context of their path-dependent career...

In an influential paper Mankiw, Romer and Weil (1992) argue that evidence on the international disparity in levels of per-capita income and rates of growth is consistent with a standard Solow model, once it has been augmented to include human capital as an accumulable factor. In a study on...

The purpose of this paper is to try to shed some new light on the current industrial policy crisis. This paper proposes that the industrial policy debate is shaped by knowledge about the functioning of the underlying industrial structure, which in turn is the Gegenstand of scholars in the field...

This paper proposes a new measure of skills mismatch that combines information about skill proficiency, self-reported mismatch and skill use. The theoretical foundations underling this measure allow identifying minimum and maximum skill requirements for each occupation and to classify workers...

This paper studies theoretically and empirically why and how labor policies may reduce productivity and employment in order to stabilize labor incomes and redistribute resources. It proposes a specific stylized model where the tradeoffs facing labor policies are influenced by structural factors,...

We investigate the impact of the absence of short selling on the pricing of managerial skills in the mutual fund industry. In the presence of divergent opinions regarding managerial skills, fund managers can strategically use fees to attract only the most optimistic capital. The recognition of...

We use detailed information about wages, education and occupations to shed light on the evolution of the U.S. financial sector over the past century. We uncover a set of new, interrelated stylized facts: financial jobs were relatively skill intensive, complex, and highly paid until the 1930s and...