This paper analyzes the connection between informal insurance institutions in rural Africa and the adoption of new technologies. We model two linked games — a community risk-sharing game and an old-age insurance game — and analyze the multiple equilibria that arise. We provide a numerical example that indicates that informal insurance institutions may put a downward pressure on the adoption of ...

This papers analyses the causes behind Africa’s unfortunate transformation into the source of the world’s slaves over the early modern period. We discuss the economic and technological forces leading to it, and address questions such as why were most slave buyers Europeans and most slave sellers Africans. We then relate the discussion to the long-term determinants of African underdevelopment, a...

The Demand for Labor: An Analysis Using Matched EmployerEmployee Data from the German LIAB. Will the High Unskilled Worker Own-Wage Elasticity Please Stand Up? This paper uses matched employee-employer LIAB data to provide panel estimates of the structure of labor demand in Germany, 1993-2002, distinguishing between highly skilled, skilled, and unskilled labor and between the manufacturing and ...

This paper studies whether labor scarcity encourages technological advances, i.e., technology adoption or innovation, for example, as claimed by Habakkuk in the context of 19th-century United States. I de…ne technology as strongly labor saving if technological advances reduce the marginal product of labor and as strongly labor complementary if they increase it. I show that labor scarcity encour...

Article history: Received 14 August 2007 Revised 8 July 2008 Available online 23 August 2008 JEL classification: J61 J64 E24 P23 R11 O33

Revolutionary Effects of New Information Technologies In markets with imperfect information and heterogeneity, the information technology affects the rate at which agents meet, which in turn affects the distribution of production technologies across firms. We show that in models for such markets there are typically multiple equilibria because reservation utility levels and the lowest production...

This paper extends the literature on technology adoption by introducing a distinction between technological breakthroughs (‘innovations’) and the engineering re/nements (‘improvements’) that follow such a breakthrough. Firms do not necessarily wait for a future technological breakthrough, but instead have an incentive to delay the adoption of a new technology until it is su2ciently advanced. We...

In a multi-industry growth model, firms require external funds to conduct productivityenhancing R&D, and face financing constraints. The cost of research differs across industries, so that financing constraints hinder productivity growth in some industries more than in others. Equilibrium industry dynamics map into a differences-indifferences regression specification where industry growth depen...

Article history: Received 25 November 2013 Received in revised form 17 June 2015 Available online 13 July 2015 JEL classification: O33 O31 E22

This article shows that in the presence of environmental externalities, it may be welfare enhancing to overcome a technological lock-in by a deadend technology through governmental intervention. It is socially desirable to subsidize a dead-end technology if its environmental externality is small relative to the one of the established technology, if the installed base and/or the strength of the ...