We analyze the role of imitation and innovation in promoting technological progress in new members of European Union: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. The two modes of technological development-innovation and imitation-are distinguished from one another by identifying the...

This paper intends to combine two fields in the economic literature by examining empirically the FDI pattern -horizontal versus vertical- within the European Union and the relevance of trade integration as a potential determinant of investment flows over the period 1995-2009. We capture trade...

Recent empirical studies have been searching for evidence on and driving forces for offshoring. Frequently, this has been done by analyzing gross trade flows related to offshore activities using gravity equations augmented by ad hoc measures of supply-side country differences. This paper...

We analyze various normatively determined distributions of language rights in multilingual settings. A general model for the analysis of language rights over time in a model with overlapping generations is set up. This model is then first used to find efficient allocations of rights in the...

We study experimentally when, why, and how people intervene in others’ choices. Choice Architects (CAs) construct opportunity sets containing bundles of time-indexed payments for Choosers. CAs frequently prevent impatient choices despite opportunities to provide advice, believing Choosers...

The social cost of carbon (SCC) is a monetary measure of the harms from carbon emission. Specifically, it is the reduction in current consumption that produces a loss in social welfare equivalent to that caused by the emission of a ton of CO2. The standard approach is to calculate the SCC using...

This paper studies the implications of monopsony power for optimal income taxation and welfare. Firms observe workers’ abilities while the government does not and monopsony power determines what share of the labor market surplus is translated into profits. Monopsony power increases the tax...

Empirical welfare analyses often impose stringent parametric assumptions on individuals’ preferences and neglect unobserved preference heterogeneity. In this paper, we develop a framework to conduct individual and social welfare analysis for discrete choice that does not suffer from these...

We analyze the welfare implications of property taxation. Using a sufficient statistics approach, we show that the tax incidence depends on how housing prices, labor and other types of incomes as well as public services respond to property tax changes. Empirically, we exploit the German...

Using new data on linguistic diversity across and within countries, we examine novel channels though which language affects trade patterns and economic welfare. We find that linguistic similarity within a country accounts for about 10 percent of estimated ‘home bias’, demonstrating the...