This paper examines whether credit constraints affect Chinese firms’ absorption of productivity spillovers from foreign firms. Using firm-level data for 2001-2005, we find evidence of positive spillovers originating from FDI from countries other than Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan for non-state...

We analyse how different labour market institutions - employment protection versusflexicurity - affect technology adoption in unionised firms. We consider both trade unions’ incentives to oppose or endorse labour-saving technology, and firms’ incentives to invest in such technology. We find...

This paper examines how product market competition affects firms’ timing of adopting a new technology as well as whether the market provides sufficient adoption incentives. It shows that adoption dates differ not only among symmetric firms but also among markets with Cournot and Bertrand...

This paper presents empirical evidence against the popular perception that macro volatility is exogenous. We obtain tax effects on macro aggregates in the stochastic neoclassical model. Taxes are shown to affect the second moment of output growth rates without affecting the first moment....

The theoretical literature on the economics of fiscal federalism has identified several potential effects of government decentralization on economic growth. Much of the traditional literature focuses on the efficiency aspects of a decentralized provision of public services. However,...

This study proposes an analytical framework towards behavioral political economy of institutional change. It considers institutional changes as central government’s choices under uncertainty, which are largely driven by the strategic outcomes in a behavioral coordination game between local...

This paper studies the effect of landownership concentration on school enrollment for nineteenth-century Prussia. Prussia is an interesting laboratory given its decentralized educational system and the presence of heterogeneous agricultural institutions. We find that landownership concentration,...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the long run relationship between the development of banks and stock markets and economic growth. We make use of a Johansen-based panel cointegration methodology allowing for cross-country dependence to test the number of cointegrating vectors among these...

We claim that a sequential mechanism linking history to development exists: first, history defines the quality of social capital; then, social capital determines the level of corruption; finally, corruption affects economic performance. We test this hypothesis on a dataset of Italian provinces,...

Beyond years of schooling, educational content can play an important role in the process of economic development. Individuals’ choices of educational content are often shaped by the political economy of government policies that determine the incentives to acquire various skills. We first...