Productivity, Innovation and Input-Output Networks

We analyse the process of innovation and new technology in relation to social identity and production networks

• We analyse the process of innovation using state of the art network analysis tools that are widely used in economics, applied mathematics, computer science and quantitative social sciences. The main goal of this research area is to study how existing patents and innovations lead to new patents that link to older ones.

• We focus on the role of social identity in the adoption of new products and technologies. For example, it has been shown that using social identity as a proxy for unobserved network structures, the network explains the behaviour in the context of technology adoption.

• We model the input-output structure of the economy using network techniques. Standard development accounting exercises decompose the cross-country variation of log real income into the share coming from technology differences and the share explained by factor difference. Our research goes a step further and decomposes the variation coming from technology into the share coming from the shape of industry-level production functions (the input-output structure) and the share coming from the level of industry-level production functions (Hicks-neutral productivity gaps). The project is very data intensive and requires to homogenise a variety of data contained in the output tables from many countries.

View our list of members below and learn more about their individual research interests by visiting their staff profiles: