Why don't poor countries adopt more productive technologies? Is there a role for policies that coordinate technology adoption? To answer these questions, we develop a quantitative model that features complementarity in firms' technology adoption decisions: The gains from adoption are larger when more firms adopt. When this complementarity is strong, multiple equilibria and hence coordination failures are possible. More important, even without equilibrium multiplicity, the model elements responsible for the complementarity can substantially amplify the effect of distortions and policies. In what we call the Big Push region, the impact of idiosyncratic distortions is over three times larger than in models without such complementarity. This amplification enables our model to nearly fully account for the income gap between India and the US without coordination failures playing a role.
Authors
Francisco J. Buera, Hugo Hopenhayn, Yongseok Shin, Nicholas Trachter
- Acknowledgements & Disclosure
- We thank Andy Atkeson, Ariel Burstein, Ezra Oberfield, Michael Peters, and participants at several seminars and conferences for comments and suggestions. We thank Eric LaRose, Reiko Laski and James Lee for outstanding research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond or the Federal Reserve System. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3386/w28561
- Published in
- United States of America
