Urban development thrives from technology inflows, which refers to the transfer of high-value technology from various cities to local recipients. The asymmetry of technical information-rooted in the tacit knowledge inherent in technology-mandates that technology transfer is heavily dependent on...

We in this paper assess the impacts of technological change on China's regional disparities using a general equilibrium model of multiple regions and multiple sectors. We use the most recent available Chinese interregional data to calibrate the model parameters for 1987 and 2000. We then assess...

This paper empirically tests the hypothesis that landed elites may block technological change and economic development if they fear that they will lose future political power (Acemoglu and Robinson (2002, 2006, and 2012). It exploits a plausible exogenous change in the distribution of political...

If Janossy's theory should concisely be drafted, one might say that he had been researching the "real carrier of economic development" in a very original way and having formulated his theory in a specific language. He managed to identify the "carrier" of development focusing on the systematic...

We study the effect of railroad access on urban population growth. Using GIS techniques, we match triennial population data for roughly 1,000 cities in nineteenth-century Prussia to georeferenced maps of the German railroad network. We find positive short- and long-term effects of having a...

While the worldwide spread of smartphones continues, developing countries have become important markets for these devices. Smartphones’ independence of landline networks qualifies them for communication and Internet access in rural areas of developing countries. Drawing upon rural Southeast...

We analyze investment decisions when information is costly, with and without delegation to an agent. We use a rational-inattention model and compare it with a canonical signal-extraction model. We identify three "investment conditions". In "sour" conditions, no information is acquired and no...

Railroad access can accelerate the technological progress in the industrial sector and therefore induce structural change and urbanization, the two common features of modern economic growth. I examine this particular mechanism in the context of Japanese railroad network expansion and modern...

Railroad access may accelerate technological progress in the industrial sector and induce structural change and urbanization - the two common features of modern economic development. By digitizing novel datasets of factories and railroad networks in late 19th- and early 20th-century Japan and...

This paper discusses the implications of autonomous-connected-electric-shared vehicles (ACES) for public finance, which have so far been widely ignored. In OECD countries, 5-12% of federal and up to 30% of local tax revenue are currently from fuel and vehicle taxation. The diffusion of ACES will...