Essays on Technology, Finance, and Macroeconomics

Abstract

My dissertation evaluates technology adoption and transfer both theoretically and empirically, with the goal of providing new insights into the consequences of technology adoption -- an area that remains understudied in the macroeconomic literature. The first chapter introduces and summarizes the whole work. The second chapter investigates the firms' propensity to merge. The major aim of it is to analyze the mechanism of technology adoption across firms under a framework in which technology is transferred through mergers and acquisitions. The third chapter proposes a new simulation-based method for rare events data, in which the binary dependent variables have dozens to thousands of times fewer ones (events, such as mergers) than zeros ("nonevents", such as pseudo mergers). The last chapter analyzes the Cross-Country Historical Adoption of Technology (CHAT) data set, which covers the diffusion of about 110 technologies in over 150 countries since 1820. I then document six general facts about cross-country technology adoption and income inequality.