This paper aims at establishing the existence of systematic differences in the nature of competitive strategies available to individual firms across industries. By means of qualitative content analysis, we extracted a matrix of 76 industries times 12 strategies reported as being characteristic...

Intangible assets, like patents and trademarks, are increasingly seen as the key to competitive success and as the drivers of corporate profit. Moreover, they constitute a major source of profit shifting opportunities in multinational enterprises (MNEs) due to a highly intransparent transfer...

Intangible assets are one major source of profit shifting opportunities due to a highly intransparent transfer pricing process. Our paper argues that multinational enterprises (MNEs) optimize their profit shifting strategy by locating shifting–relevant intangible property at affiliates with a...

Intangible capital is an important factor of production in modern economies that is generally neglected in business cycle analyses. We demonstrate that intangible capital can have a substantial impact on business cycle dynamics, especially if the intangible is complementary with production...

This essay deals with the relationship between stagflation and the process of restructuring. The literature dealing with the interaction of stagnation and inflation is invariably based on some explicit or implicit assumptions about economic structure, but there are very few writings which...

A major puzzle is that despite the apparent importance of innovation around the knowledge economy, UK macro performance appears unaffected: investment rates are flat, and productivity has slowed down. We investigate whether measurement issues might account for the puzzle. The standard National...

Several studies indicate that stock option plans are becoming more and more a substantial part of compensation schemes in U.S. companies. This paper argues that for an employer the attractiveness of stock options arises from the U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (US-GAAP) which...

The paper surveys the recent literature on the fiscal implications of central bank balance sheets, with a special focus on political economy issues. It then presents the results of simulations that describe the effects of different scenarios for the Federal Reserve's longer-run balance sheet on...

Asymmetric persistence of accounting income is often tested in a regression of changes in earnings on lagged changes in earnings, including an interaction term for negative changes (see Basu [1997] or Ball et al. [2009] for a recent overview). In this note we propose an alternative, but closely...