The practical impossibility of employing hard law at an international level has meant that softer codes of conduct have stepped in to fill the void. The Global Compact is the most ambitious of these codes, created with a desire to engage business in the project of international development and...

Does the new technological paradigm based on information and communication technologies (ICTs) create new windows of opportunity or further obstacles for catching up countries? The paper discusses this question by taking neo-Schumpeterian long wave theory as the basic framework of analysis....

Previous literature presented a predation model based on agency problems in financial contracting. In that model, predation reduced prey’s cash flow through breaking the relationship between the prey and its investors as the prey is financially constrained. This paper presents a different...

Playing a bargaining game the players are trying to enlarge their share of a sugar-pie. However, HE is not very keen on sweets and does not prefer a piece of the pie if the size of the pie is too small or too large. In HIS view, too small or too large pies are not of a reasonable quality. In...

This paper examines whether the Mortensen-Pissarides matching model can account for the housing market facts, most of all the empirical anomaly known as ‘price dispersion’. Our main finding is that the model can account for the three basic facts of housing market (namely, the existence of...

This paper develops a matching model à la Pissarides (2000) in order to explain the basic facts of housing markets, most of all the variance in house prices. Price dispersion is basically due to both the ex-ante heterogeneity of the parties and the search costs of buyers and sellers. In fact,...

It has been argued that weaknesses inherent in Private Law rules, which contribute to its inability to effectively regulate contracts, are in part, attributed to its generality as well as inflexibility in adapting to individual situations. Whilst self-regulation, a constituent of the standard...

We use cooperative game theory to analyze how the architecture of the pipeline network determines the power structure in the supply chain for Russian gas. If the assessment is narrowly focused on the abilities to obstruct flows in the existing system, the main transit countries, Belarus and...

This paper tests the pro-competitive effect of imports on product and labour markets for Spanish manufacturing firms in the period 1990-2005. In doing so, it takes into account the type of imported products: final vs intermediate. Markups are estimated following the procedure suggested by Roeger...

This paper tests three hypotheses concerning intra-household resource allocation in rural China. First, whether increasing the women's bargaining power alters household expenditure patterns. Second, whether households allocate fewer resources to daughters than to sons. Third, whether increasing...