To date there has been few systematic and comparative empirical analyses of the nature of economic development in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS). We contribute to addressing this gap by exploring the patterns of structural change between 1980 and 2010, focusing on the...

Industrialization is vital for inclusive and sustainable global development. The two engines of industrialization - innovation and trade - are in danger of being compromised by the COVID-19 pandemic, under conditions increasingly reminiscent of the medieval world. It comes at a time when...

Our research investigates the magnitude of the effect of residential energy efficiency audit programs on later household electricity consumption. These programs are designed to increase awareness of household energy consumption with personalized feedback that will eventually lead to behavioral...

We examine heterogeneity in Norwegian households' price responses to critical peak pricing (CPP) on electricity consumption, using a large-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT), high-frequency electricity data, and default enrollment. Increasing the grid transmission charge by 4,067%...

Business support policies designed to raise productivity and employment are common worldwide, but rigorous micro-econometric evaluation of their causal effects is rare. We exploit multiple changes in the area-specific eligibility criteria for a major program to support manufacturing jobs...

This paper investigates the effect of awarding a second investment grant to the same firm. We implement a Regression Discontinuity Design strategy using a very rich firm-level administrative database, which allows us to link applications to grants and their scores to firms' performance. Overall,...

We introduce a simple oligopolistic trade model with international transportation costs, and analyze the profitability and the social desirability of national vs. international mergers in relation to three different issues, (i) the level of trade freeness, (ii) the possibility of rent...

This paper documents the relationship between foreign ownership and firm survival for enterprises in Germany using unique tailor-made new representative data that merge information from surveys performed by the Statistical Offices, from administrative data collected by the Tax Authorities and...

This paper looks at the trade off between investment incentives and exit costs for the location of foreign direct investment (FDI). This issue does not appear to have been tackled in much detail in the literature. The analysis considers the effect of profit taxation (as a measure of investment...

Entrepreneurs who decide to enter an industry are faced with different levels of effective entry costs in different countries. These costs are heavily influenced by economic policy. What is not well understood is how international trade affects the government incentive to impact on entry costs,...