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Plain-language summaries

Every published draft working paper has a plain-language companion: the paper carries the proofs, the data, and the caveats; the summary carries the ideas. Nineteen summaries, one per paper; each takes about ten minutes, and each links to the full draft it condenses. No economics background needed. The policy papers carry no summary, being written for their reader already.

The measurement thread: what Europe actually holds

  1. Is your "sovereign cloud" actually sovereign? Dependence travels down the whole supply chain, so checking the provider's passport checks almost nothing. The measured map of 52 categories, and which policy works at which layer. · Full paper (PDF)

  2. Who could switch off Europe's digital economy? Two numbers for whole stacks: how many actors must act together to cut you off, and how many genuinely independent ways of operating you have. · Full paper (PDF)

  3. Nobody denied you anything. The fifteen ways to hold power over a technology market, including the six quiet ones: they edit what you consider, and unconsidered options die. · Full paper (PDF)

  4. Why Europe keeps losing the tech champions it grows. Control leaves through four doors, and one structural feature predicts staying: no governance-locked European technology firm was taken over against its will. · Full paper (PDF)

  5. One catastrophic dependency counts less than five mild ones. The official dependency index counts how many things are bad rather than how bad the worst one is, its own tables contradict its own prose, and the area it ranks most dependent flips on half of all admissible reweightings. · Full paper (PDF)

The mechanisms thread: why the instruments behave as they do

  1. Cheaper, and losing. European cloud is several times cheaper and its share halved anyway: buyers sort by altitude, markets tip on network effects, and the levers that work are un-bundling and the egress rules. Playable live. · Full paper (PDF)

  2. The subsidiary passes every audit. That is the problem. Which procurement requirements can tell a genuine supplier from a well-lawyered pretender: some cannot, at any price; the best audit is a cascade. · Full paper (PDF)

  3. Portability or ownership screens? Wrong question. Exit instruments insure harms that announce themselves; screens prevent the silent ones; and in an exact band, the screen works only with the mandate beside it. · Full paper (PDF)

  4. One Union, two opposite screens. Why Europe screened Huawei structurally and the hyperscalers behaviourally: verifiability plus where the losing coalition could spend its influence. · Full paper (PDF)

  5. The product with no budget line. A component bundled into a licence at zero incremental price is never compared with anything, which is why discounts bounce off it and why itemising the price is the cheap instrument. · Full paper (PDF)

  6. The leverage that was already in the rules. A programme funding half of each project reports a leverage of one whatever its beneficiaries do: what the co-funding ratio identifies, and what the Digital Europe Programme's own tables show. · Full paper (PDF)

The architecture thread: where lock-in is made

  1. How locked in are you, exactly? Two axes and an auditable exit-tax formula for cloud services; why egress rules reach only a fraction of the exit tax; and the leverage ladder showing most EU spending at the shallow end. · Full paper (PDF)

The build criterion: what to build, in what order

  1. The stack behind the invoice. Europe's digital build list ranked by composing measured dependencies with sourced market economics: captured where non-EU providers hold the market nearly outright, thin where Europe's largest positions sit, and the exposure arriving through tooling blocks procurement never sees directly. · Full paper (PDF)

The OSS-economics wing: demand and supply of open source

  1. The other ninety percent. How open-source companies actually make money: services around code they do not own, with the funding path deciding who contributes and who encloses. The licensing wars belong to the venture-backed slice. · Full paper (PDF)

  2. The club that pays in code. Pooling European demand for open source: members pay dues in code as well as cash, free-riding shrinks with scale, an anchor buyer of computable size solves the everyone-waits problem, and real clubs already run in Denmark and Wallonia. · Full paper (PDF)

  3. Who adopts open source? Ask who the adopter is. The survey design: acceptance segmented by what organizations can do with source code, with the tests committed in advance. A design; no data yet. · Full paper (PDF)

  4. The comparison that flips. The methods trap in comparing adoption drivers across groups: naive comparisons can conclude effort matters least where it binds most, and ratios fix it. · Full paper (PDF)

The practitioner track: doing it

  1. The middle option almost nobody picks. Between staying with the incumbent and migrating off it sits a third position that buys most of the benefit for a fraction of the cost, and the break-even figure that needs no guess about what you pay today. · Full paper (PDF)

  2. The office suite goes last. Two separable stages, why the usual migration order is backwards, and the finding that the strongest resistance comes from the IT department rather than from users. · Full paper (PDF)

The other guided entry point is interactive: the graph and the models, live.