Following a severe contraction in the early 1990s, the Swedish economy accumulated a strong record of output growth coupled with a disappointing performance in the labor market. As of 2005, hours worked per person 20-64 years of age are 10.5 percent below the 1990 peak and a mere one percent...

What factors determine national differences in the size and industry distribution of employment? We stress the role of the economic policy environment as determined by business taxes, employment securitylaws, credit market regulations, the national pension system, wage-setting institutions and...

We study the competitive forces that shaped ideological diversity in the US press in the early twentieth century. We find that households preferred like-minded news and that newspapers used their political orientation to differentiate from competitors. We formulate a model of newspaper demand,...

Certificate of Need Laws (CON), state laws requiring providers to obtain licenses before adopting healthcare technology, have been controversial. The effect of CON on technology supply has not been well established. In part this is because analyses have focused on state-level supply effects,...

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 reviews recent academic work on the spatial concentration of entrepreneurship and innovation in the United States. We discuss rationales for the agglomeration of these activities and the economic consequences of clusters. We identify and discuss policies that are being pursued in the...

This paper examines R&D activities in the European Community using the Community R&D Information Service (CORDIS) databases. We find that a country's private companies tend to be specialized in the same scientific fields as its universities and public organizations. In addition, we construct...

An industrial policy of subsidizing physical capital investment has been utilized in many countries in order to encourage export growth and spread economic development to outlying areas. For Israel, we possess a unique time series-cross section micro data set that details investment and its...

The pre-1990 Swedish tax system strongly disfavored younger, smaller and less capital-intensive firms and sectors and discouraged entrepreneurship and family ownership of businesses in favor of institutional ownership. Credit market regulations, the national pension system, employment security...

The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of R&D policy in Israel, and critically examine the policies currently in place as well as proposals to change them. We review in Part I the various programs of the Office of the Chief Scientist (OCS) of the Ministry of Industry and Trade in...