Sampling poses an interesting problem in markets with experience goods. Free samples reveal product quality and help consumers to make informed purchase decisions (promotional effect). However, sampling may also induce consumers to substitute purchases with free consumption (displacement...

Making video clips of a song unavailable on YouTube has no effect on its sales on iTunes; but album sales suffer when video clips of a song from it are made unavailable on YouTube. These findings of a study by Tobias Kretschmer and Christian Peukert suggest that we need not worry too much about...

Firms face competing needs to expand product variety and reduce production costs. Trade policy affects firm investments in product variety and production processes differently. Access to larger markets enables innovation to reduce costs. Although firm scale increases, foreign competition reduces...

This paper studies the effect of a change in the marginal costs of advertising on advertising expenditures of firms and consumer prices across industries. It makes use of a unique policy change that caused a decrease of the taxation on advertising expenditures in parts of Austria and a...

This paper develops a theory of technology transfer when technology is embodied in human capital and learning requires on-the-job communication between managers and workers. Patterns of knowledge diffusion depend on where high knowledge managers work and how much time they allocate to training...

Work of low-skilled migrant workers from developing countries in developed economies is a growingphenomenon and a key political and economic issue. An extensive literature has found (for the mostpart) that these workers come from the lower part of the skill distribution. This paper revisits...

This paper presents new evidence on managerial and organizational factors that explain firm level energy efficiency and TFP. We interviewed managers of 190 randomly selected manufacturing plants in the UK and matched their responses with official business microdata. We find that 'climate...

This report presents new evidence relating to the effects of climate policy in Europe, particularly the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). The evidence is based on new data from almost 800 phone interviews we conducted with managers in manufacturing plants in six European...

We use a representative and cross-country comparable sample of manufacturing firms (EFIGE) to document patterns of interaction among firm-level internationalization, innovation and productivity across seven European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom). We...

Technology has transformed the once powerful office of ambassador into a glorified sales position, while nurses, teaching assistants and medical technicians all benefit from the ICT revolution. According to an empirical study by Professor John Van Reenen and colleagues, these contrasting...