This paper analyses the issue of parallel trade (arbitrage) for products protected by intellectual property rights. Many countries have traditionally allowed owners of intellectual property rights to prohibit arbitrage in the face of international price discrimination. In a well-known paper...

Most of the contest literature deals with first prizes; this Paper deals with the optimality of second prizes. We show that in a three-person contest where one contestant is very strong a second prize can be optimal from the point of view of eliciting maximum effort from every contestant....

Pressure on public finances has increased scrutiny of public support for innovation. We examine two particular issues. First, there have been many recent calls for the (relatively new) UK R&D subsidy to be extended to other "research" activities, such as software. Second, argument still rages...

An extensive literature on the convergence of productivity between countries examines whether productivity is pulled towards the global frontier country, perhaps due to learning and knowledge spillovers. More recently, studies within countries use the wide dispersion of productivity across firms...

We (a) propose an implementable innovation index, (b) relate it to existing innovation definitions and (c) show whole-economy and industry-specific results for the UK market sector, 2000-2005. Our innovation measure starts by observing that we could get more GDP without innovation by simply...

We examine the relationships between productivity growth, IT investment and organisational change (DO) using UK firm data. Consistent with the small number of other micro studies we find (a) IT appears to have high returns in a growth accounting sense when DO is omitted; when DO is included the IT...

We use UK micro data to explore whether planning regulation reduced UK retailing productivity growth between 1997 and 2003. We document a shift to smaller shops, particularly within supermarket chains, following a regulatory change in 1996 which increased the costs of opening large stores. This...

Using two matched plant level skills and productivity datasets for UK manufacturing we document that (i) more productive firms hire more skilled workers: in 2000, plants at the top decile of the TFP distribution (controlling for their four-digit industry) hired workers with, on average, around...

We use retail transaction prices for a multinational retailer to examine the extent and permanence of violations of the law of one price (LOOP) for identical products sold in a variety of countries. We find median deviations of twenty to fifty percent. The differences are not systematic across...

This paper examines how firms interact with their rivals. The main novelty of our approach is that we let conjectural variations depend on the actual ability of other firms to react, which we measure by both the physical capacity and financial status of firms. Our main findings are threefold....