We report the short-term results from a randomized evaluation of a mobile phone literacy and numeracy program (Project ABC) in Niger, in which adult literacy students learned how to use mobile phones as part of a literacy and numeracy class.  Students in ABC villages showed substantial gains in...

Although research and development is widely considered to be an important source of growth, relatively little is known about how its effects differ across industries. This is mainly because much research on the effect of R&D has used either cross-section or time-series data and the remainder has...

This paper reviews the literature on the economics of intellectual property rights (IPR), with a particular focus on the main industrial property rights of patents and trade marks. Intellectual property rights arise from the legal protection accorded to certain inventions or creations. We begin...

Recently, business-university collaborations have become the subject of much interest. It is important to distinguish between `blue-sky` research and more directly commercially applicable research. This paper provides a framework in which to think about the latter. A simple screening model is...

Demand for less skilled workers decreased dramatically in the US and in other developed countries over the past two decades. We argue that pervasive skill biased technological change rather than increased trade with the developing world is the principal culprit. The pervasiveness of this...

Much of the dramatic change in skill and wage structure observed in recent years in the United States is believed to stem from the impact of new technology. This paper compares the changing skill strcuture of wage bills and employment in the United States with six other advanced developed...

Using a newly constructed data set, we compare sources of funds and investment strategies of venture capital (VC) funds in Germany, Israel, Japan and the UK. Sources of VC funds differ significantly across countries, e.g. banks are particularly important in Germany, corporations in Israel,...

Increasingly, development projects list social capital development and network brokerage among their objectives.  How do we quantitatively evaluate such initiatives?  Best practice, diff-in-diff methods may be impossible or too costly.  Here, we try using data that are byproducts of the...