Related papers: Vertical vs. Horizontal Policy in a Capabilities M…
What drives formal employment creation in developing cities? We find that larger cities, home to an abundant set of complex industries, employ a larger share of their working age population in formal jobs. We propose a hypothesis to explain…
Economic transformation -- change in what an economy produces -- is foundational to development and rising standards of living. Our understanding of this process has been propelled recently by two branches of work in the field of economic…
Most explanations of economic growth are based on knowledge spillovers, where the development of some technologies facilitates the enhancement of others. Empirical studies show that these spillovers can have a heterogeneous and rather…
Reinforcement learning practitioners often avoid hierarchical policies, especially in image-based observation spaces. Typically, the single-task performance improvement over flat-policy counterparts does not justify the additional…
Economic complexity methods, and in particular relatedness measures, lack a systematic evaluation and comparison framework. We argue that out-of-sample forecast exercises should play this role, and we compare various machine learning models…
Reinforcement learning can train policies that effectively perform complex tasks. However for long-horizon tasks, the performance of these methods degrades with horizon, often necessitating reasoning over and chaining lower-level skills.…
We define a novel quantitative strategy inspired by the ecological notion of nestedness to single out the scale at which innovation complexity emerges from the aggregation of specialized building blocks. Our analysis not only suggests that…
This paper studies multilateral matching in which agents may negotiate contracts within any coalition. We assume scale economies such that an agent substitutes some existing contracts with new ones only if the latter involve a set of…
One-shirt-size policy cannot handle poverty issues well since each area has its unique challenges, while having a custom-made policy for each area separately is unrealistic due to limitation of resources as well as having issues of ignoring…
Opportunities such as higher education can promote intergenerational mobility, leading individuals to achieve levels of socioeconomic status above that of their parents. We develop a dynamic model for allocating such opportunities in a…
Efforts to apply economic complexity to identify diversification opportunities often rely on diagrams comparing the relatedness and complexity or products, technologies, or industries. Yer, the use of these diagrams is not based on…
We analyze the decisive role played by the complexity of economic systems at the onset of the industrialization process of countries over the past 50 years. Our analysis of the input growth dynamics, based on a recently introduced measure…
When deploying artificial skills, decision-makers often assume that layering human oversight is a safe harbor that mitigates the risks of full automation in high-complexity tasks. This paper formally challenges the economic validity of this…
Using the Triple Helix model of university-industry-government relations, one can measure the extent to which innovation has become systemic instead of assuming the existence of national (or regional) systems of innovations on a priori…
We propose a novel kinetic exchange model differing from previous ones in two main aspects. First, the basic dynamics is modified in order to represent economies where immediate wealth exchanges are carried out, instead of reshufflings or…
Large artificial intelligence (AI) models have garnered significant attention for their remarkable, often "superhuman", performance on standardized benchmarks. However, when these models are deployed in high-stakes verticals such as…
Estimating the capabilities, or inputs of production, that drive and constrain the economic development of urban areas has remained a challenging goal. We posit that capabilities are instantiated in the complexity and sophistication of…
Evaluating the economies of countries and their relations with products in the global market is a central problem in economics, with far-reaching implications to our theoretical understanding of the international trade as well as to…
Policy gradient is a generic and flexible reinforcement learning approach that generally enjoys simplicity in analysis, implementation, and deployment. In the last few decades, this approach has been extensively advanced for fully…
Model-free learning-based control methods have seen great success recently. However, such methods typically suffer from poor sample complexity and limited convergence guarantees. This is in sharp contrast to classical model-based control,…