Paul A. David

Paul A. David is Professor Emeritus of Economics, Quondam William Robertson Coe Professor Emeritus of American Economic History, and Senior Fellow Emeritus of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University. He is also a Professorial Fellow of the United Nations University - MERIT in Maastricht (NL), an Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College,  Professor Emeritus of Economics and Economic History, and former Senior Fellow of the Oxford Internet Institute, in the University of Oxford. David was among the pioneering practitioners of the "new economic history," and is known internationally for wide-ranging contributions in the fields of American economic history, economic and historical demography, and the economics and economic history of science and technology and their supporting institutions. The Investigation of the conditions that give rise to 'path dependence'—the persisting influence of historical events in micro and macroeconomic phenomena—is a recurring central theme in his theoretical and empirical contributions. Two main areas of contemporary economic policy research have been salient in his publised  work the past two decades: the evolution of network technology standards and network industries, and the influence of legal institutions and social norms upon the funding and conduct of scientific research in the public sector, and the interactions between that latter and private sector R&D. In recent years his policy-related research has focused on the economics of integrated programs of technological, regulatory and fiscal measures that are designed to achieve a timely social-welfare optimizing transition to a stabilized global climate that would avert the onset of irreversible, catastrophic warming of the Earth's surface and the accidification of the oceans due to the green-house effects of the rise in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide.