This paper offers an extensive survey and a critical discussion of the empirical literature on the driving factors of R&D. These factors are subsumed under five broad types. The paper first summarises the key predictions from theory regarding each type's R&D effect. It then examines for which...

We conduct Monte Carlo simulations of principal components analyses of unrelated time series in order to investigate whether the stationarity properties of the data matter, as they do for least-squares regression analysis. We find that for stationary series the results are standard and reflect...

In the 1990s, competition among health insurance funds (‘sickness funds’) was introduced in Germany. As one means of competition, free choice of initial health funds and subsequent switching between them was made available to all insured. Since then, the number of funds has decreased...

This paper examines the relationship between the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) sector and economic growth for an annual panel of Brazilian states for the period 1985-2004. We investigate the importance of the relative size of the SME sector measured by the share of the SME employment in...

We present a common factor framework of convergence which we implement using principal components analysis. We apply this technique to a dataset of monthly inflation rates of EMU and the Eastern European New Member Countries (NMC) over 1996-2007. In the earlier years, the NMC rates moved...

We propose a common factor approach to analyse convergence, which we implement using principal components analysis. We show that this method provides a useful new way of approaching the convergence debate. We apply this technique to a dataset of nominal and real monthly exchange rates of the...