Michael König

TI and Spatial Economics Department
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Bio:
Michael König . I work on the economics of innovation and technical change, and how these affect and are being affect by networked relationships between various economic actors, ranging from individuals, firms, sectors to countries. My research combines both, theoretical as well as empirical methods, and I use these methods to evaluate real world policy instruments. 

Topic: In a recent research project I analyze how networks representing (i) the competition/market structure between firms and (ii) their technological relatedness (technology diffusion) change over time by building a comprehensive database from the firms’ Internet web pages. The project involves the development of novel web-scraping and text-mining tools applied at a large scale. Due to the spatial and temporal granularity of the proposed method, new technologies and their diffusion can be tracked and predicted similar to how meteorologists forecast the weather.