This paper studies cross-border intellectual property rights (IPR) as a North-South contract using a Nash bargaining approach and distinguishes between the outcome and its actual enforcement. The absorptive capacity of the Southern country to exploit technology transfer plays a key role in the...

We show that the distribution of plant size within narrowly defined industries is affected by the variation in the stock of civic capital that occurs at the provincial level. Data on plant size come from the 2001 Italian Census of Manufacturing and Services. Civic capital turns out to have a...

In this work we analyze the relationship between the patterns of firm diversification, if any, across product lines and across bodies of innovative knowledge, proxied by the patent classes where the firm is present. Putting it more emphatically we investigate the relationship between "what a...

This article explores the dynamics of market selection by investigating of the relationships linking productivity, profitability, investment and growth, based on China's manufacturing firm-level dataset over the period 1998-2007. First, we find that productivity variations, rather than relative...

Social norms of cooperation are studied under several forms of communication. In an experiment, strangers could make public statements before playing a prisoner’s dilemma. The interaction was repeated indefinitely, which generated multiple equilibria. Communication could be used as a tool to...

We study individual behavior of students and workers in an experiment where they repeatedly faced with the same cooperative task. The data show that clerical workers differ from college students in overall cooperation rates, strategies adopted, and use of punishment opportunities. Students...

We revisit the debate on the optimal number of firms in the commons in a differential oligopoly game in which firms are either quantity- or price-setting agents. Production exploits a natural resource and involves a negative externality. We calculate the number of firms maximising industry...

We model an industry in which a discrete number of firms choose the output of their differentiated products deciding whether or not to consider the impact of their decisions on aggregate output. We show that two threshold numbers of firms exist such that: below the lower one there is a unique...

We show that the standard argument according to which supply function equilibria rank intermediate between Bertrand and Cournot equilibria may be reversed. We prove this result within a static oligopolistic game in which both supply function competition and Cournot competition yield a unique...