Engel's law is known to be extraordinarily consistent across time and space. Accordingly, it has been widely used to determine poverty. However, also among the poorest, a certain amount of non food spending is necessary. To substantiate the distinction between necessities and luxuries, already...

Innovations in information- and telecommunication technology render the proximity requirement between business partners obsolete and make business service outsourcing via cross-border trade more feasible. Although the (service-led) growth prospects have been widely discussed, evidence at the...

This paper analyzes the influence of the shadow economy on corruption and vice versa. We hypothesize that corruption and shadow economy are substitutes in high income countries while they are complements in low income countries. The hypotheses are tested for a crosssection of 120 countries and a...

We apply the accelerator principle to measure the functional efficiency of capital markets. We estimate the elasticity of capital with respect to output using a panel of firms across 44 countries, and compare the results with existing approaches. Furthermore, we correlate our measure with...

The environmental discussion is increasingly extended to the question of how to preserve biodiversity. As sensible regulation of biodiversity utilization uses politically set incentive schemes, it is required to discus the monetary value of biodiversity. Consequently, the relation between...

This paper investigates the determinants of success in the development of new drugs. In specific, it explores the factors of success in drug development programs at different stages of innovation process. We use economies of scale, scope, R&D competition and technological spillovers as...

This paper aims to investigate the effect of knowledge characteristics on the total factor productivity of firms developing drugs in the pharmaceutical industry. We decompose knowledge into knowledge associated with the technological firm portfolio and knowledge related to R&D projects, which...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the existence of cross-level moderating effects between national appropriability conditions, individual level predictors and entrepreneurial growth aspirations. We test a multi-level model that connects the determinants of strategic resource allocation...

This study explores the impact of social capital on innovation by constructing a more general measure of social capital indicator consisting of generalized and institutional trust, associational activities and civic norms. We test the hypothesis that social capital has a positive impact on...

This paper empirically analyzes the impact of aid on education for about 100 countries over the period 1970 - 2005. We estimate a system of equations to test whether and to what extent the impact of sector-specific aid on educational attainment depends on (i) the extent to which aid adds to...