In local, as well as in national and international contexts, the relationships between the different craft guilds and the academies were intricate. The different institutions engaged in dialogues as well as in conflicts and determined the state of the art world in the middle, early modern and...

Because of the alarming discussion about robotisation and the potential loss of jobs, the effect of technological change on employment is back at the center of social debate. This study reviews the empirical evidence of 44 micro-level studies on the quantitative impact of innovation on...

We study the relationship between efficient markets, value neutrality and symmetric maximum entropy principle. We find that the efficient market is in the state of maximum information entropy, which means that market prices fluctuate randomly, that value neutrality is in the state of maximum...

Why China was not the origin of the Industrial Revolution but rose from imperial dynasties and experienced a growth miracle in the past four decades? We find that its root is China's imperial examination system (keju), which explains the fall and rise of historical, modern, and contemporary...

We study how extreme (high) temperatures affect firm dynamics---entry, exit, and aggregate productivity---in Chinese manufacturing sectors. Existing studies focus on the effects on incumbent firms (intensive margin), while we examine the effects on entry and exit (extensive margin), and their...

Input-output linkages among sectors and firms are largely overlooked when assessing regulatory policies. Using a carbon emissions regulation in China as an example, we find that the regulation facilitates the transition to green technologies and reduces entry and carbon emissions in the...

Three key economic issues are the convergence debate, the middle-income trap, and the East Asian Miracle. Here we show that the standard Solow-Swan growth model in discrete time can simultaneously account for these key economic issues if in addition the no arbitrage constraint is imposed on the...

This paper establishes a novel argument that social networks among local politicians reduce spatial frictions of corporate investment. We leverage the replacement of city officials and the resulting exogenous variations of hometown ties among city party secretaries to examine their impact on...

I propose a mathematically tractable model to study the optimal compensation scheme in organizations with arbitrary interpersonal networks, in which agents connected in a network help neighbors and work collectively to produce a team's output, and payment is an equity share linked to the...

As Africa’s major oil exporter and factor driven stage country, Nigeria has made some progress in socioeconomic terms in recent years. However, large pockets of Nigeria’s population still live in poverty without adequate access to basic services. Currently, Nigeria is capturing just as small...