TY  - JOUR
AU  - Comin,Diego
AU  - Hobijn,Bart
AU  - Rovito,Emilie
TI  - Five Facts You Need to Know About Technology Diffusion
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 11928
PY  - 2006
Y2  - January 2006
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11928
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11928.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Diego A. Comin
Harvard Business School
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
Tel: 617/495-5011
E-Mail: dcomin@hbs.edu

Bart Hobijn
Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
Economic Research Department, Mailstop 1130
101 Market Street, 11th floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
Tel: 415 974 2314
Fax: 415 974 2168
E-Mail: bart.hobijn@sf.frb.org

Emilie Rovito
Domestic Research Function
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
33 Liberty St.
New York, NY 10045
E-Mail: no email available
AB  - This paper presents a new data set on the diffusion of about 115 technologies in over 150 countries over the last 200 years. We use this comprehensive data set to uncover general patterns of technology diffusion. Our main 5 findings are as follows: (i) Once the intensive margin is measured, technologies do not diffuse in a logistic way. (ii) Within a typical technology, the dispersion in the adoption levels across countries is about 5 times larger than the cross-country dispersion in income per capita. (iii) The rankings of countries by level of technology adoption are very highly correlated across technologies. (iv) Within a typical technology, there has been convergence at an average rate of 4 percent per year. (v) The speed of convergence for technologies developed since 1925 has been three times higher than the speed of convergence for technologies developed before 1925.
ER  -