An effective policy scheme to overcome the suboptimal low provision levels of global public goods is developed in this paper. By suggesting a decentralized approach to raise environmental public good provision levels we take account of the lack of a coercive global authority that is able to...

We develop a model to analyze one mechanism under which stronger intellectual property rights (IPR) protection may improve the ability of firms in developing countries to break into export markets. A Northern firm with a superior process technology chooses either exports or technology transfer...

It has long been argued that the implementation of market-based environmental policy instruments such as environmentally-related taxes and tradable permits is likely to lead to greater technological innovation than more direct forms of regulation such as technology-based standards. One of the...

We conduct an empirical investigation into the effects of foreign ownership on worker skills using firm-level data from Spain. To control for endogeneity bias due to selection into foreign ownership, we combine a difference-in-differences approach with a propensity score weighting estimator. Our...

This paper studies the origins and consequences of international technology gaps. I develop an endogenous growth model where R&D efficiency varies across countries and productivity differences emerge from firm-level technology investments. The theory characterizes how innovation and learning...

We explore whether the way in which tax credits are disbursed affects the gross wage of workers. We exploit an unusual reform in Argentina that shifted the disbursement responsibility of child benefits from employers to a government agency in a staggered fashion, from 2003 to 2010. Using...

This paper studies the causal effect of technology and knowledge transfers on early industrial development. Between 1950 and 1957, the Soviet Union supported the “156 Projects” in China for building technologically advanced industrial facilities. We exploit idiosyncratic delays in project...

Firm-to-firm relationships in global value chains create opportunities for North-South technology diffusion. This paper studies technology transfer in value chains when contracts are incomplete and input production technologies are imperfectly excludable. The paper introduces a new taxonomy of...

This paper studies the impact of technological architecture around data storage and processing on the performance of large financial corporations after being exposed to more stringent data privacy regulations. A modular approach to cloud adoption – which reflects in the lack of data...

Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions but identifying their causal effects is notoriously difficult. Using admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings' college options, we present evidence from the United States, Chile,...