Limited empirical work has been done to the diverging current account balances of the individual emerging Asian economies. Based on the intertemporal approach to current account, this paper empirically examines both the long-run and short-run impacts of initial stock of net foreign assets,...

Conventional wisdom has it that policy innovation is better promoted in a federal rather than in a unitary system. Recent research, however, has provided theoretical evidence to the contrary: a multi-jurisdictional system is characterized - due to the existence of a horizontal information...

We suggest a probabilistic voting model where voters' preferences for alternative public goods display habit formation. Current policies determine habit levels and in turn the future preferences of the voters. This allows the incumbent to act strategically in order to influence the probability...

We present a theory to explain government procrastination as a consequence of its present-bias resulting from the political uncertainty in a two-party political system. We show that under a two-party political system the party in office tends to be present-biased. This may lead to inefficient...

In a model on population and endogenous technological change, Kremer combines a short-run Malthusian scenario where income determines the population that can be sustained, with the Boserupian insight that greater population spurs technological change and can therefore lift a country out of its...

Recent empirical literature has introduced the "kill Biased Organizational Change" hypothesis, according to which organizational change can be considered as one of the main causes of the skill bias (increase in the number of highly skiled workers) exhibited by manufacturing employment in...

Skill-biased technical change has occupied empirical economists for much of the 90s. However, the empirical literature has not progressed much beyond observing a positive correlation between technology indicators and demand shifts. Two hypotheses on the root causes of skill biases in technical...

In this paper I will focus exclusively on opportunity in the narrow sense and therefore on the origin of the required knowledge. For the purpose of this paper an opportunity exists when all reqiured elements of knowledge are "out there" and await the arrival of a keen entrepreneur to recognize,...

This study distinguishes multinational firm (MNE) technology-spillover from learning effects. Whenever learning takes time, the model predicts that foreign investors deduct the economic value of learning from wages of inexperienced workers and add it to experienced ones to prevent them from...

This paper is based on the model of backward linkages from foreign direct investment (FDI) Lin/Saggi (2003), where the market structure of the final goods sector is represented by a monopoly or Cournot oligopoly, and the supplier sector - by a pure monopoly. We extend this model by examining...