This study analyzes the factors that explain the variations of daily airfares across fare histories, or dynamic price dispersion. Empirical analyses show that dynamic price dispersion is significantly influenced by demand characteristics variables such as population, income and the share of...

Investments in R&D and agricultural innovations have been fundamental to long-term economic growth worldwide. But global resource allocation has been uneven, with some developing countries closing in on developed-world scientific capacities, others regaining ground lost over the past decade or...

Using the financial and macroeconomic dataset of 132 countries, this study empirically analyzes the effects of financial regulations and innovations on the global financial crisis. It shows that regulatory measures such as restrictions on bank activities and entry requirements have decreased the...

Commissioned by the CGIAR Science Council and prepared as a Background Paper for the 2008 World Development Report of the World Bank.

<italic>This paper examines the factors that affect market dominance in a standards competition by comparing the VHS--Beta war in the 1980s with that between Blu-ray and HD-DVD in the 2000s. We first look at the changing home video market in terms of technological development. Then we move on to discuss...</italic>

"We examine access to, use of, and participation in decisions on improved water supply in the Volta basin of Ghana, one of the first countries to introduce a community-based approach to rural water supply on a large scale. While 71 percent of the households interviewed have access to improved...

In a climate of rapid technological change, it is important to evaluate policies on the innovation incentives that result from the introduction of intellectual property rights as they relate to agricultural genetic resources. In this paper, we use a stylized model of cumulative innovation to...

Worldwide, the number of genebanks and the amount of seed stored in them has increased substantially over the past few decades. Most attention is focused on the likely benefits from conservation, but conserving germplasm involves costs whose nature and magnitude are largely unknown. In this...

When a new technology consists of sequences of innovations that culminate in a final consumer product, the balance between successive innovators is one of the main concerns in the design of the patent system. While intertemporal aspects of incentive are critical in this environment of sequential...

The lack of ex-ante evaluation of germplasm in genebanks has been the single most prevalent and long-standing complaint of plant breeders about the management of genebanks. Advances in biotechnology offer the possibility of faster, cheaper, and more efficient evaluation methodologies. Will these...