Diego Comin

Associate Professor of Business Administration

Diego Comin is an Associate Professor of Business Administration at HBS since 2007. He received his B.A. in Economics in 1995 from the University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain and his PhD in Economics from Harvard University in 2000. Between 2000 and 2007, Comin has been Assistant Professor of Economics at New York University. He is also Research Fellow at the Center for Economic policy Research and Faculty Research Fellow in the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Economic Fluctuations and Growth Program. Comin has also been fellow for the INET and Gates foundations and consultant for the World Bank, IMF, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Citibank, and the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) of the government of Japan.

Comin works on macroeconomics broadly understood. Part of his research consists on studying the process of technological change and technology diffusion both across countries and over time. A second avenue of Comin’s work studies the sources and propagation mechanisms of fluctuations at high and medium term frequencies. A third line of research pursued by Comin has explored the evolution of firm dynamics and their implications for the evolution of the US economy. His work has been published mainly in academic journals, including the American Economic Review, the American Economic Journal, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics and the Journal of Economic Growth.

Comin teaches his elective course (Drivers of Competitiveness) in the MBA program and also a module in the executive program (Program for Leadership Development). For four years, Comin has taught in the first year of the MBA year the required course Business Government and the International economy (BGIE). He has also designed and led immersion programs in Peru and Malaysia.

 
  1. PRESENTATION BY MALAYSIA IXP TO PM NAJIB

  2. My data sets

    CHAT. The cross-country historical adoption (chat) dataset is an unbalanced panel dataset with information on the adoption of over 100 technologies in more than 150 countries since 1800. We discuss the main aim of CHAT, its scope and limitations, as well as several ways in which we have used the data so far and ways to potentially use the data for other research.

    Data   Documentation  Paper

    Primitive Technology. The primitive technology dataset measures at three points in history the presence of specific technologies in the territories that correspond to modern day countries. The periods covered are 1000 B.C., 0 A.D. and 1500 A.D. (i.e. right before the colonization). The technologies in the data set cover five wide sectors: agriculture, transportation, communication, military and industry.

    Data   Documentation  Paper

  3. Hotel Survey

    Survey directed to managers in the hotel industry to assess the factors that affect development and operation of hotels. If you're a hotel manager, I would appreciate that you take five minutes to fill it. 

    Survey