In August 1995, Netscape held its initial public offering and caught the attention of every participant in computing and communications. It was a catalytic event for the commercial Internet, and it started the beginning of a long boom in investment by private firms, households, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists. With the 20th anniversary approaching, it’s time …
Economic Analysis of the Digital Economy
Is digitization destroying the music industry? A recent study shows that it may improve it by enabling new acts to enter at low cost. (Ch. 14, "Digitization and the Quality of New Media Products") What aren’t you doing while you are spiraling down an Internet black hole? Mostly watching TV and offline socializing, according to …
Mathiness: A Guide for the Perplexed
From my twitter feed at the annual American Economic Association meetings, we knew it was coming: Paul Romer (the founder of endogenous growth theory) had levelled an attack on many macroeconomic theorists including his advisor Bob Lucas. The nature of this attack would have to arrive in May when the article appeared in the American …
Spreading me about
Over the past week I have posted a few things elsewhere that may be of interest to readers of this blog. Over at The Conversation, I have launched a new column called -- The Disruptive Economist -- which has a certain appeal to me. The first column was about Uber and its recent PR troubles …
Tirole and Pasteur
There are lots of criteria that we use to think about why someone should win a Nobel prize. There is creative genius, there are pioneering findings but, in reality, the dominant criteria is impact. The tough issue is usually "impact on what?" Because being at the frontier is difficult, most specialise in their impact. To be …
Did the Internet Prevent all Invention from Moving to one Place?
The diffusion of the internet has had varying effects on the location of economic activity, leading to both increases and decreases in geographic concentration. In an invited column at VoxEU, Chris Forman, Avi Goldfarb and I presents evidence that the internet worked against increasing concentration in invention. This relationship is particularly strong for inventions with …
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The Capital Creators, Piketty and Growth Theory
Something new has happened in economics this month: an influential academic book has been written. Actually, I should say something old has happened because there was a day that academic economists wrote books that had influence. My guess is that it has been about four decades since someone has put original research in the form …
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Podcast about bias and slant on Wikipedia
The web site, Surprisingly Free, organized a podcast about my recent paper, Collective Intelligence and Neutral Point of View: The Case of Wikipedia, coauthored with Harvard assistant professor Feng Zhu. Click here. The paper takes a look at whether Linus’ Law applies to Wikipedia articles. Do Wikipedia articles have a slant or bias? If so, …
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The Irony of Public Funding
Misunderstandings and misstatements perennially pervade any debate about public funding of research and development. That must be so for any topic involving public money, almost by definition, but arguments about funding for scientific research and development contain a unique and special irony. Well-working government funding is, by definition, difficult to assess, because of two criteria …
The Giant's Shoulders: Suzanne Scotchmer
Sad news today that Suzanne Scotchmer has passed away. She was a professor of both economics and law at Berkeley and one of the most significant figures in applied economic theory over the past few decades. The loss from cancer came as a shock to many of us in the field. I can hardly imagine …
Digitopoly 