We study how incentives for North-South technology transfers in multinational enterprises are affected by labour market institutions. If workers are collectively organised, incentives for technology transfers are partly governed by firms' desire to curb trade union power. This will affect not...

Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protect firms from imitation and are considered crucial to promote innovation and technological diffusion. This paper examines the impact of IPR on import sourcing decisions of multinationals. We consider a framework in which firms offshore production of an...

This paper shows that households with positional concerns and convex status utility use gambling to attempt leapfrogging in the social hierarchy. We test this theoretical prediction relying on household data that is representative for Germany, proxying the status orientation of households by...

We analyze the impact of international R&D spillovers on recipient countries in terms of social and private returns. We divide the aggregate R&D stock by the business, government and education sectors and examine the impact on Total Factor Productivity. We endogenize the accrual of the R&D...

Given significant expenditures on education technologies, an important question is whether these products are adopted by their end users and are effective in practice. This paper studies the adoption, diffusion, and effects of one type of technology that is increasingly ubiquitous:...

We analyze a repeated game in which countries are polluting as well as investing in technologies. While folk theorems point out that the first best can be sustained as a subgame-perfect equilibrium when the players are sufficiently patient, we derive the second best equilibrium when they are...

Theoretical analysis and empirical evidence show that leadership behavior in climate policy through increased abatement efforts or international transfers cannot be expected to be very successful. In this paper we instead show that pioneering activities, which are based on green technological...

It is believed that market power of the input supplier, charging a linear price, is detrimental for the consumers since it creates the double marginalisation problem. We show that this view may not be true if the final goods producers can adopt strategies to reduce rent extraction by the input...

This paper considers investments in cost-reducing technology in the context of contributions to climate protection. Contributions to mitigating climate change are analyzed in a two-period model where later contributions can be based on better information, but delaying the contribution to the...

Cross-country regressions suggest that urbanization and FDI are important drivers of growth. However, it is not clear that primacy eventually hurts growth performance. Since it is tough to interpret cross-country growth regressions, we provide detailed evidence on the determinants of outward FDI...