Abstract Constitutions are commonly described as national products shaped by domestic politics. This paper develops and empirically tests a different hypothesis, which is that constitutions are also shaped by transnational influence, or “diffusion”. Constitutional rights can diffuse through...

This paper reconstructs the long-term development of retailing, including industrial, economic and social antecedents and consequences. Among other things, it includes innovation in the form of the emergence and diffusion of successive novel types of shop (including self-service), relations...

Abstract: This paper suggests that contingent on the productivity level of the trade partner; international trade may create resource misallocation in less productive countries. It theoretically shows how the interaction between technology diffusion induced by trade and cross sectoral...

This paper reconstructs the long-term development of retailing, including industrial, economic and social antecedents and consequences. Among other things, it includes innovation in the form of the emergence and diffusion of successive novel types of shop (including self-service), relations...

Employed technologies differ vastly across countries. Within countries many technologies that would obviously improve firms’ efficiency are not adopted. This paper explains these observations by emphasizing that a new technology positively affects workers by lowering prices and increasing...

Abstract: This paper considers a firm that has the option to undertake product innovations. For each product innovation the firm has to install a new production plant. We find that investments are larger and occur in a later stadium when more of the old capital stock needs to be scrapped....

In this paper, we study how regulators may improve upon the efficiency of their energy technology adoption programs by exploiting readily observable information to limit rent extraction by firms. Using panel data on 862 investment decisions in the Netherlands, we find that rent extraction is...

Where is the productivity growth from the IT revolution? Why did the skill premium rise sharply in the early eighties? Were these phenomena related? This paper examines these questions in a general equilibrium model of growth. Technological progress in firms is driven by research aimed at...