Technology & Innovation

A recent New York Times article observed that Americans want action to address inequality. 2016 presidential candidates from both parties also acknowledge that inequality is a pressing concern. But not one of the candidates has proposed to do anything meaningful about it, sharing wealthy Americans’ (understandable) opposition to any solution (Scheiber 2015). Perhaps nothing has been done because there is nothing to do about it.

We develop a novel stress-test framework to monitor systemic risk in financial systems. The modular structure of the framework allows to accommodate for a variety of shock scenarios, methods to estimate interbank exposures and mechanisms of distress propagation.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking held its sixth Annual Conference from April 8 to April 11, 2015, in collaboration with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris.

This text is part of a research project still in working progress that collects different contributions by the author and rewrite and reanalyse some reflections, already present, in a different form, in some publications:

When the adoption of a new labor‐saving technology increases labor productivity, it is an open question whether the economy adjusts in the medium‐term by decreasing employment or increasing output. This paper studies the effects of cheaper electricity on the labor market during the Great Depression.

Individuals derive benefits from their connections, but these may, at the same time, transmit external threats. Individuals therefore invest in security to protect themselves. However, the incentives to invest in security depend on their network exposures. We study the problem of designing a network that provides the right individual incentives.

The ongoing explosion of the incomes of the richest households and the erosion of middle-class employment opportunities for most of the rest have become integrally related in the now-normal operation of the U.S. economy.

Private data is leaked more and more in our society. Wikileaks, Facebook, and identity theft are just three examples. Network defenses are constantly under attack from cyber criminals, organized hacktivists, and even disgruntled ex-employees.

This research project improves our understanding of the effects of intellectual property rights—and in particular copyrights—on creativity and innovation.

This research project develops a “Money View” analysis of the recent evolution of China’s financial system.

This research project uses information from digitized Google books and library catalogues to create new measures of technological innovation and diffusion for OECD countries from 1850 to the present.

This research project offers a historical taxonomy of organizational ways that governments fund and implement industrial and innovation policy as well as a taxonomy of contemporary implementation practices.

This research project examines the long process of innovation at Fair Isaac, the analytics firm behind the FICO scoring system.

This research project explores the causes and consequences of the way countries innovate and the economic foundations for the government’s direct involvement in conducting innovation.

Few would argue that America’s fortunes rise and fall on its ability to generate technological innovations — to put bold ideas to work and then bring them to market.