This dissertation is divided into three essays. The first essay focuses on the question of enfranchisement of groups of individuals. Existing research work in the area has not adequately addressed this question. Indeed, previous analyses have focused on the value of a vote for a single...

We investigate whether the tax status of a country has an impact on the corporate capital structure. This research question is important and timely given that the empirical literature has not reached a consensus on the effect of taxes on corporate leverage. The Gulf Cooperation Council region,...

We study the impact of the 2008 financial crisis on the capital structure of GCC firms. We employ a dataset covering a 10-year period from eight sectors to investigate patterns in corporate leverage before and after the crisis and identify changes in debt financing. Our results indicate that...

We show that the presumed incompatibility of uncoordinated R&D and competition is not fundamental, but hinges on the nature of R&D spillovers. As a consequence, R&D subsidies may be more effective than previously thought.

The Trade Restrictiveness Index (TRI) introduced by Anderson and Neary (1994) provided the first theoretically satisfying measure of a country's tariff structure by overcoming the problem of ad hoc specification of indexing weights and the related index number problem. We observe, however, that...

Under the standard summation technology, pure public goods can be provided via the direct contributions mechanism, even in an arbitrarily large group. However, if the public good exhibits any degree of rivalry, individual consumption of the public good will fall to zero as group size grows...

We show that the presumed incompatibility of R&D and competition in Spence (1984) is not fundamental, but hinges on a critical modeling choice. Specifically, we show that for a widely used class of R&D technology, that is, the functional form mapping R&D effort into cost reduction, the...

The Trade Restrictiveness Index (TRI) introduced by Anderson and Neary (1994) provided the first theoretically satisfying measure of a countrys tariff structure by overcoming the problem of ad hoc specification of indexing weights and the related index number problem. We observe, however, that...

We characterize asymmetric equilibria in two-stage process innovation games and show that they are prevalent in the different models of R&D technology considered in the literature. Indeed, cooperation in R&D may be accompanied by high concentration in the product market. We show that while such...