This paper argues that openness to goods trade in combination with an unequal distribution of political power has been a major determinant of the comparatively slow development of resource- or land-abundant regions like South America and the Caribbean in the nineteenth century. We develop a...

This paper examines the impact of capital market integration (CMI) on higher education and economic growth. We take into account that participation in higher education is noncompulsory and depends on individual choice. Integration increases (decreases) the incentives to participate in higher...

This paper develops a model with multiple market locations in which the quality of intangible assets of firms, provided by management, determines the firms. performance. Despite an ex ante symmetry of potential entrants, the equilibrium assignment of heterogeneous managerial skills to firms...

This paper develops a quality-ladder model of endogenous growth to study the interplay between in-house R&D and marketing expenditure. Although promotional activity is modelled as purely wasteful competition among firms for attention, it unambiguously fosters innovation activity of firms, and...

A positive relationship between firm size and product diversification is a long-standing stylized fact. However, so far there is no appropriate theoretical model to explain the underlying forces of this observation. This paper analyzes an oligopoly model with asymmetric multiproduct frms, which...

Empirical evidence suggests that positive externalities from R&D exceed negative ones. According to conventional wisdom, this calls for R&D subsidies. This paper develops a quality-ladder growth model with overlapping generations which evaluates the positive and normative implications of R&D...

We develop a dynamic two-party political economy framework, in which parties seek to maximize vote share and face the trade-off between catering to their respective core constituencies on the one hand and "middle of the road" voters with no partisan affiliation on the other hand. In contrast to...