We look at disaggregated imports of various types of equipment to make inferences oncross-country differences in the composition of equipment investment. We make threecontributions. First, we document strikingly large differences in investment composition.Second, we explain the differences as...

The rise in inequality and poverty is one of the most important economicand social issues in recent times. But in contrast to the literature onindividual earnings inequality, there has been little work modelling (asopposed to documenting) household income dynamics. This is largelybecause of the...

The paper analyzes the existence and impact of …financing constraints as a possiblyserious obstacle to innovation by …firms. Direct measures of fi…nancing constraints areemployed using survey data collected by the Banque de France and Eurostat, whichovercomes the problems with the traditional...

Recent research on international productivity comparisons has focused on the discrepancies between benchmark comparisons and time series extrapolations from other benchmarks. For a 1907 benchmark, Stephen Broadberry and Carsten Burhop (2007) find German manufacturing to be only slightly ahead of...

We show that the joint liability lending contracts derived in Ghatak (2000) violate an ex post incentive-compatibility constraint which says the amount of joint liability cannot exceed the amount of individual liability. We derive and characterize optimal separating joint liability contracts...

Parental divorce has been an increasing experience amongst thegenerations of children born since the 1970s in European countries. Thisstudy analyses data on the partnership and parenthood behaviour ofthose children who experienced parental separation during childhoodfor nine Western European...