The first aim of this paper is to decompose the productivity advantage of foreign multinationals into two components: the technology and scale effect. The second aim is to analyse the causal relationship between foreign ownership and these two components of productivity growth. We do so by...

An enormous number of empirical papers have estimated technical efficiency, the distance of firms inside a frontier, following the model of Farrell (1957). We propose a theory that explains the distance these empirical papers seek to measure. The theory is based on the idea that workers can...

Using a stochastic frontier model and a comprehensive dataset, we study factors that affect corporate efficiency in Europe. We find that (i) larger firms are less efficient than smaller firms, (ii) greater leverage contributes to corporate efficiency, and (iii) high competition is less...

This microeconometric study analyzes the effects of individual leisure sports participation on long-term labour market variables, on socio-demographic as well as on health and subjective well-being indicators for West Germany based on individual data from the German Socio-Economic Panel study...

Recent estimates of convergence equations using panel data techniques tend to produce theoretically unpalatable results which run counter to the views prevailing in the literature. This paper argues that these results may be partly due to the difficulty of empirically separating short-term...

Major events in the life of an elderly individual, such as retirement, a significant decrease in income, death of the spouse, disability, and a move to a nursing home, may affect the mental health status of the individual. For example, the individual may enter a prolonged depression. We...

This Paper studies the interaction between repeated auctions of rail franchises of different lengths, uncertainty, and incentives for investment in rolling stock, following the privatization of British Rail. Theoretical predictions are tested empirically using a unique panel of data. Theory...

This Paper investigates the empirical relationship between uncertainty and investment dynamics. This is motivated by the real options literature, which suggests a weaker response of investment to demand shocks at higher levels of uncertainty, as firms place a greater value on the option to wait....

This paper analyses differences in welfare utilization between immigrants and natives in Sweden using a large panel data set, LINDA, for the years 1990 to 1996. Both welfare expenditures and immigration increased substantially in Sweden in the 1990's. We find that immigrants use welfare to a...

We estimate scale elasticities in firms' money demand using panel data. Our main data set is a sample of Spanish companies observed over 1983-96. We also analyse comparable UK and US data sets. We find that the errors in money demand equations contain two terms correlated with sales: first, a...