Research and development has traditionally been concentrated in Western countries, particularly the US, potentially leading to the development of technologies particularly suited to these economies and hindering productivity growth elsewhere. This column examines the impact of the increase in venture capitalism funnelled towards Chinese firms. The authors find that the rise of a new hub […]
Green innovation is a key ingredient in the fight against climate change. But while there has been significant progress over the last few decades, momentum has slowed down in recent years. This column shows that green innovation not only helps the environment but also increases economic activity in the short-to-medium term, thereby mitigating the costs […]
The spread of misinformation online poses grave challenges to public health. This column quantifies the impact that vaccine scepticism circulating through social media had on paediatric health outcomes in Italy from 2013–2018. The dissemination of long-discredited links between autism and the combined measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine had significant consequences. A ten percentage point increase […]
The ambition of the Paris Agreement is to limit global warming to “well below 2°C”. This column argues that while some progress towards this aim has been made, substantially more policy action is required. Since 2015, new challenges have emerged for climate policy, including rising populism, shrinking fiscal space, a surge in inflation, higher interest […]
The rise of generative artificial intelligence has triggered a debate about the appropriate protections for copyrighted data. This column examines the economic incentives and social welfare implications of different copyright approaches. For ‘small’ AI models (trained using an identifiable corpus of content), it shows that giving content owners full copyright protection leads to higher investments […]
Most industrialised nations have experienced a notable decline in manufacturing employment, sparking concerns over regions being ‘left behind’. Many policies have been proposed to limit the impact of deindustrialisation and foster local economic recovery, yet their efficacy is often unproven. This column uses a wide-ranging dataset covering 1,993 cities across six countries to show the […]
Nearly 160 years after the end of slavery, significant disparities persist between Black and white Americans. This column studies the long-run effects of slavery, and the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation following the Civil War, on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. Those whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have less education, income, […]
The Inflation Reduction Act aims to narrow the gap between greenhouse gas mitigation pledges and implementation in the US. This column uses a novel IMF model to assess the impact of the climate-related measures in the Act. Absent permitting-related investment delays, the measures take the US roughly half of the way to the target of […]
After the American Civil War, Black people in the South were granted new political and civil rights, only for such gains to be reversed within a few decades by white supremacists. This column studies how dramatic institutional change in the Reconstruction era affected the political and socioeconomic outcomes of Black people in the American South. […]
Climate change is a topic that is especially prone to political polarisation and ‘asymmetric updating’ – the tendency for people to assign more weight to information that conforms to prior beliefs and less weight to evidence that challenges those beliefs. This column reports on responses from two surveys in Sweden, separated by a heat wave, […]
