Fragmentation of stages of the production process is determined by international cost differences and by the benefits of co-location of related stages.  The interaction between these forces depends on the technological relationships between these stages.  This paper looks at both cost...

Contemporaries and historians have highlighted London's position as the world's leading financial centre, and its dominance of both trade financing and international capital investment at this time.  The current historical literature focuses on the presence of the London Stock Exchange and...

In this paper we investigate the implications of labour and capital market imperfections for the relationship between firm size and earnings. To establish that such a question is of interest we need to show that the firm size-wage effect cannot be explained by either the observed or unobserved...

Using data from a randomized control trail in Sri Lanka, this paper explores whether cash and in-kind grants helped microenterprises approach the productivity level of SMEs.  The paper first estimates production functions and subsequently treatment effects on TFP levels.  Most significantly,...

This paper provides an overview of a new database that contains intellectual property data - in the form of patents and trademarks - for the population of firms registered in the UK.  The paper discusses the principal challenges involved in the construction of this integrated database and...

This paper surveys the most popular parametric and semi-parametric estimators for Cobb-Douglas production functions arising from the econometric literature of the past two decades. We focus on the different approaches dealing with 'transmission bias' in firm-level studies, which arises from...

This paper analyses characteristics and determinants of the recent explosion of patent filings by Chinese firms both in China and the United States.  We construct a firm-level dataset by matching USPTO and SIPO patents to Chinese manufacturing census data for the period 1999-2006.  Using this...

Combining data from the Moroccan census of manufacturing enterprises with information from a commune survey, we test whether firm expansion is affected by local financial development.  Our findings are consistent with this hypothesis: local bank availability is robustly associated with faster...

This paper analyses the real economy effects of firms having some shareholders with a short investment horizon on their shareholder register.  Short-term shareholders cause management to be concerned with the path of the share price as well as its ultimate value.  Such shareholders in an...