Armed conflicts pose significant challenges for the international community. Conflicts cause deaths, destroy capital and the environment, deter investment, and hinder economic activity. However, little is known about the economic costs of armed conflict and even less about the impact of conflict risk. The...
Startup valuations – particularly of so-called unicorn companies valued at over $1 billion – have been skyrocketing for years, to a point where some commentators have been calling the development a ‘unicorn bubble’ or a ‘Dotcom 2.0 bubble’. Much of the ecosystem has been driven by scaling digital businesses...
Education is an important determinant of economic outcomes, but access to education is highly unequal.
Across OECD countries, the likelihood of attending a tertiary institution doubles if one parent has at least a high-school diploma, and more than quadruples if one parent has also attained...
The impact of network connections on human behaviour has been widely studied over the past twenty years; for an overview of this research see Bramoull´e, Galeotti, and Rogers [2016] and Goyal [2022]. A central insight of this research is that:
The level of an individual’s...
In classical models of information in asset markets, people learn from others only indirectly by observing market prices or quantities observed in markets. There is growing evidence that more direct forms of social interaction, such as conversation, also affect the decisions of economic agents. An open...
Digital technology has started to reshape economies and financial systems across the world. Sharing of consumer data is key to the supply of data, which is the life blood of the booming digital economy.
There are growing concerns about data privacy protections across the world, which have...
Global temperatures have increased significantly in the past half century and extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and severe. Climate change is not only affecting low-income countries, but also advanced economies—in September 2017 while Los Angeles experienced the largest fire in its...