Innovation and the Diffusion of Ideas
Paper Session
Saturday, Jan. 3, 2026 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM (EST)
- Chair: Taylor Jaworski, University of Colorado
Flora, Cosmos, Salvatio: Pre-modern Academic Institutions and the Spread of Ideas
Abstract
While good ideas can emerge anywhere, it takes a community to develop and disseminate them. In premodern Europe (1084-1793), there were approximately 200 universities and 150 academies of sciences, which were home to thousands of scholars and created an extensive network of intellectual exchange. By reconstructing interpersonal connections that were made via institutional affiliations, we demonstrate how the European academic landscape facilitated the diffusion of ideas and led cities to develop: examples include botanic gardens, astronomical observatories, and Protestantism. Counterfactual simulations reveal that both universities and academies played crucial roles, with academies being particularly effective at connecting distant parts of the network. Moreover, we show that the diffusion of ideas through the network is remarkably resilient, even if we remove key regions such as France or the British Isles. In Europe, ideas gain prominence when they are channeled effectively by powerful institutions.Migration, the Diffusion of Ideas and the Rise of the American Labor Movement: Evidence from the American Civil War
Abstract
I study the effects of the migration of particular German revolutionaries, the Fourty-Eighters, on the start of the Labor Movement in 19th Century US. I start by relying on OLS with a rich set of controls. I find a positive association between counties that received revolutionaries and the number of Knights of Labor Unions established. This relationship is robust to the exclusion of big cities, different definitions of Fourty-Eighter counties, and analyzing only small counties. Moving towards causality, I leverage the increasingly random assignment of soldiers to Union Army companies to test for the horizontal diffusion of ideology. Using soldier-level data, I construct a measure of exposure to 48er counties through having shared Civil War enlistment-a unique setting where men from diverse counties lived together for years. I find a robust effect of 48er exposure on subsequent unionization, with strong effects concentrated among counties with the highest exposure levels. This paper provides evidence for horizontal diffusion of socialist ideas across the Atlantic and highlights how the American Civil War created unprecedented ideological exchange, contributing to the development of the American labor movement.The Impact of the Nobel Prize on the Level and Direction of Innovation
Abstract
This paper examines how the Nobel Prize affects the level and direction of innovation, using a unique dataset of 466 Nobel laureates and 1,676 nominees in Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine during the 20th century. Leveraging the 50-year confidentiality rule on nominations, I compare innovation in winners' fields to those of nominees using a staggered difference-in-differences framework. I find a significant increase in patenting for up to 6 years in Physics and Chemistry, and up to 10 years in Medicine, after the award in the patent subclasses of Nobel laureates. Innovation then shifts to adjacent fields. This surge in patenting is mirrored by a rise in aligned publications whose titles and abstracts contain the same bigrams and trigrams as the winning papers. These findings suggest that the Nobel Prize boosts short-term innovation in the winning topics and fosters broader exploration over timeJEL Classifications
- N3 - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy
- O1 - Economic Development