We provide a treatment of a number of questions pertaining to pending patents – a subject that has so-far mainly been discussed en-passant in the existing literature. We present the underlying institutional and legal framework that governs pending patents and some basic facts related to them....

Manufacturing accounts for more than three-quarters of U.S. corporate patents. The competitive shock to this sector emanating from China's economic ascent could in theory either augment or stifle U.S. innovation. Using three decades of U.S. patents matched to corporate owners, we quantify how...

Building on a new data set which is combined from national micro-data bases, we highlight differences in the structure of migrants to four countries, viz. France, Germany, the UK and the US, which receive a substantial share of all immigrants to the OECD world. Looking at immigrants by source...

For a long time, migration has been subject to intensive economic research. Nevertheless, empirical evidence regarding the determinants of migration still appears to be incomplete. In this paper, we analyze the effects of socio-economic and institutional determinants, especially labor-market...

This study is framed against the increasingly stringent environmental demands on the pulp and paper industry since the late-1980s to reduce water and air pollution, and the global economic slowdown of the early-1990s. The primary focus of this paper is an observation-based analysis conducted by...

This paper applies the Phillips and Sul (2007) method to test for convergence in stock returns to an extensive dataset including monthly stock price indices for five EU countries (Germany, France, the Netherlands, Ireland and the UK) as well as the US over the period 1973-2008. We carry out the...

The paper discusses key elements of optimal central bank design and applies its findings to the Eurosystem. A particular focus is on the size of monetary policy committees, the degree of centralization, and the representation of relative economic size in the voting rights of regional (or...