Performance-raising practices tend to diffuse slowly in the health care sector. To understand how incentives drive adoption, I study a practice that generates revenue for hospitals: submitting detailed documentation about patients. After a 2008 reform, hospitals could raise their Medicare...

We report the results of a randomized experiment testing impacts of subsidies for modern agricultural inputs in rural Mozambique. One-time provision of a voucher for fertilizer and improved seeds leads to substantial increases in fertilizer use, which persist through two subsequent agricultural...

The FinTech sector has begun to grow rapidly in sub-Saharan Africa. I document far greater adoption of social media, digital currency, ride sharing, and other FinTech applications in countries with a common law legal heritage compared to those with a civil law system, suggesting that legal...

This paper explores the effects of public health insurance expansions on hospitals' decisions to adopt medical technology. Specifically, we test whether the expansion of Medicaid eligibility for pregnant women during the 1980s and 1990s affects hospitals' decisions to adopt neonatal intensive...

Many countries use uniform cost-effectiveness criteria to determine whether to adopt a new medical technology for the entire population. This approach assumes homogeneous preferences for expected health benefits and side effects. We examine whether new prescription drugs generate welfare gains...

Using administrative employee-firm-level data on the entire private sector from 1994 to 2007, we show that the labor market in France has polarized: employment shares of high and low wage occupations have grown, while middle wage occupations have shrunk. During the same period, the share of...

Local opinion leaders may play a key role in easing information frictions associated with technology adoption. This paper analyzes the influence of physician investigators who lead clinical trials for new cancer drugs. By comparing diffusion patterns across 21 new cancer drugs, we separate...

What determines the technology that a country adopts? While many factors affect technological adoption, the efficiency of the country's financial system may also play a significant role. To address this question, a dynamic contract model is embedded into a general equilibrium setting with...

In October 2014, all 4,494 undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were given access to Bitcoin, a decentralized digital currency. As a unique feature of the experiment, students who would generally adopt first were placed in a situation where many of their peers received...

We study the effect of information on technology adoption and productivity in agriculture. Our empirical strategy exploits the expansion of the mobile phone network in previously uncovered areas of rural India coupled with the availability of call centers for agricultural advice. We measure...