Deutschland hat sein Produktionsportfolio in der Periode von 1995 bis 2005 zugunsten forschungsintensiver Güter und wissensintensiver Dienstleistungen verbessert. Nicht zuletzt wegen dieser Spezialisierung sind deutsche Unternehmen auf den internationalen Märkten äußerst erfolgreich. Will...

We analyze cross-country trends in technological progress over the period of 1980-2011 by examining citations data from almost 4 million utility patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Our estimation results on patent quality and distance to the knowledge frontier reveal...

In sections one to three of this paper, we interrogate the relatively new Irish policy concept of the ‘smart economy' by relating and comparing it to recent theories engaging with the characteristics of the changing industrial economy. This summary review includes concepts such as New Economy,...

This paper aims to enrich the standard toolbox for measuring diversity in economics. In so doing, we compare the indicators of diversity used by economists with those used by biologists and ecologists. Ecologists and biologists are concerned about biodiversity: the diversity of organisms that...

This paper seeks to identify relationships between human capital and cultural capital, in the context of local labour market productivity. The key constituents of human capital, identified in the literature, are jointly examined in a close-to-reality-model. The main advantage of our model of...

We compare male and female behavior in Japan and Canada in the context of a threshold public goods game with both a strong free-riding equilibrium and many socially efficient threshold equilibria. Although higher rewards produce higher contributions, neither culture nor gender has any...

This paper compares two prominent empirical measures of individual risk attitudes - the Holt and Laury (2002) lottery-choice task and the multi-item questionnaire advocated by Dohmen, Falk, Huffman, Schupp, Sunde and Wagner (forthcoming) - with respect to (a) their within-subject stability over...

This paper studies the transmission mechanism from family culture to economic institutions, by analyzing the impact of the within family organization on the original design of the public pension systems. We build a simple OLG model with families featuring either weak or strong internal ties....