This paper explores the empirical relevance of the concept of comparative advantage and of the factor proportions theory of international trade and specialisation for the distribution of research and development (R&D) activities across seventeen industries in fourteen OECD member countries over...

This paper applies Markov chain analysis to examine the empirical dynamics of sectoral specialization in open economies. At issue is here persistence and the hypothesis of hysteresis in national patterns of industrial specialization, often claimed as an implication of strong path dependence in...

This paper analyses the efficiency of venture capital and its impact on primary equity markets in France and Germany. It shows that venture capital operates according to the signalling model in France and according to the learning model in Germany. Only the learning model can serve as a...

Several experimental studies observed substantial violations of transitivity in decisions between risky lotteries over monetary outcomes. The goal of our experiment is to test whether these violations also affect the evaluation of health states. A particular feature of our experimental design is...

This paper surveys the decision-theoretic foundations of health care production and derives policy implications. The priority at the beginning of the 21st century must be to accelerate the diffusion of new medical knowledge, a public good, so that the efficiency in the adoption of new technology...

This study investigates the role of stratification of health and income in the social cost of health-related early retirement, as evidenced in the German Socio-economic Panel (GSOEP). We interpret early retirement as a mechanism to limit work-related declines in health that allows poorer and...

This paper analyses the nature of knowledge spillovers from research and development (R&D) in the field of liquid crystal display technology by estimating the impact of inventorsÂ’ changing organizational and collaborative affiliations on the probability of citations in US patents filed...

This paper provides micro-econometric evidence on the relevance of non-market interaction for the timing of initial public offerings (IPOs) in the French and German primary equity markets. The surge of IPO volume in the late 1990s appears to be consistent with rational expectations, not with...

This paper provides new evidence on Europe's experience with venture capital in the 1990s. Individual countries' activity is not solely determined by country characteristics and a purely domestic history, but also by a common European experience: the interdependence of valuations in primary...