The flow of foreign direct investment (FDI) has increased dramatically in the last two decades. However, the distribution of FDI is highly unequal and the competition among countries to attract foreign investors is fierce. This report investigates the determinants of FDI inflows to developing...

In this paper we investigate the effect of local banking development on firms’ innovative activities, using a rich data set on innovation for a large number of Italian firms over the 1990’s. There is evidence that banking development affects the probability of process innovation,...

Small Business Administration (SBA) loans have long been one of the most significant policy interventions in the U.S. affecting firm behavior, but little is known about their outcomes. This paper estimates the effects on employment using a list of all SBA loans linked to annual data on all U.S....

The evidence suggests that relational contracting and legal rules play an important role in credit markets but on the basis of the prevailing field data it is difficult to pin down their causal impact. Here we show experimentally that relational incentives are a powerful causal determinant for...

Electricity consumption will comprise an increasing share of global energy demand during the next two decades. In recent years, the increasing prices of fossil fuels and concerns about the environmental consequences of greenhouse gas emissions have renewed the interest in the development of...

Status considerations with respect to consumption give rise to negative externalities because individuals do not take into account that their decisions affect the relative consumption position of others. Further, status concerns create incentives for excessive labour supply in competitive...

The unprecedented deterioration of our global environment has increased the necessity of relying upon Green Economic policies as critical and effective environmental management tools. The current situation has stimulated extensive research and debate among global interest groups. This has...

Traditionally, it has been argued that profit sharing can increase employment and welfare because it lowers marginal labour costs without reducing total cost or labour income. In this paper, we show that profit sharing can also represent a Pareto-improvement if labour supply is excessive due to...

The increased concerns about climate change have made renewable energy sources an important topic of research. Several scholars have applied different methodologies to examine the relationships between energy consumption and economic growth of individual and groups of countries and to analyze...

Driven by an ever-growing number of studies that explore the effectiveness of institutional mechanisms meant to mitigate cooperation problems, recent years have seen an increasing interest in the endogenous implementation of these institutions. In this paper, we test within a unified framework...