This paper examines the consequences of introducing mobile number portability (MNP). As MNP allows consumers to keep their telephone number when switching providers, it reduces consumers' switching costs. However, MNP may also cause consumer ignorance if telephone numbers no longer identify...

The spectrum for third generation (3G) mobile communications for the German market was alloted to operators by means of an auction. This resulted in a highly competitive outcome: six operators were given rights to provide 3G services. Government revenues from this auction were a staggering EUR...

This paper examines the lasting impact of the alignment of African countries during the Cold War on their modern economic development. We find that the division of the continent into two blocs (East/West) led to two clusters of development outcomes that reflect the Cold War's ideological divide....

This paper uses the automobile industry and the clothing and textile industry as lenses to examine the impact of the Covid pandemic on globalization. We focus on the case of South Africa, where both sectors have a long history. In the early decades of neoliberal globalization the country's...

This paper is part of a comparative project on the Varieties of Covid-19 Reactions and Changing Modes of Globalization in the Global South. The project employs a comparative analysis of two industries-automobiles and clothing/textiles-across four countries in order to analyze the impacts of the...

Can digital information and communication technology (ICT) foster mass political mobilization? We use a novel geo-referenced dataset for the entire African continent between 1998 and 2012 on the coverage of mobile phone signal together with geo-referenced data from multiple sources on the...

While growth has increased in Tanzania during the past five or six years, it is still too low to have a visible impact on poverty. Indeed, recent evidence suggests that the amount of both income and non-income poverty are roughly the same as they were a decade ago. Since debt relief provided...

We measure the welfare consequences of endogenous quality choice in imperfectly competitive markets. We introduce the concept of a "quality markup" and measure the relative welfare consequences of market power over price and quality. For U.S. paid-television markets during 1997-2006, we find...