This paper studies the origins of trademark registration in Spain and offers, for the first time, data across sectors and regions with a long-term perspective. In apparent contradiction to the slow path of industrialization and the economic backwardness of Spain between 1850 and the 1940s,...

The economic performance of a country depends, among other things, on the strategies and structures of its firms. In the framework that is designed by institutions and policies and determined by technology and macroeconomic cycles, entrepreneurs decide how to allocate available resources in...

To fully understand governance and authority in the large corporation, one must attend to politics. Because basic dimensions of corporate organization can affect the interests of voters, because powerful concentrated interest groups seek particular outcomes that deeply affect large corporations,...

Why do some countries suffer from backward financial institutions and weak corporate governance rules? We show that, even if, overall, the economy would benefit corporate governance reforms, not all the agents would stand to gain from the improvement. In particular, entrepreneurs and firms that...

Although many economists do a serious and respectable work, main stream economic theory contains an almost complete disregard for the importance of social, cultural and political structures which are the very foundation of the society. Worse than that, such disregard is developed into arrogance...

The paper argues that the Indian Managing Agencies that controlled most industrial firms and their associated enterprises were themselves embodiments of pre-industrial forms of capital, accumulated through trading and moneylending. This militated against technological dynamism within the...

This work is a PhD dissertation, written at the Department of Economics, McGill University. The thesis offers a new framework for inflation as a process of restructuring. Contrary to existing theories of inflation, which tend to take structure and institutions as given for the purpose of...

In this paper, we evaluate the impact of creditor rights and political risk on both the number and the value of cross-border M&A flows in a gravity model using a negative binomial model and Heckman’s two-stage selection model, respectively. Our results confirm that creditor-friendly rules and...

Most econometric studies of equity market integration suggest that national markets are increasingly becoming part of a global equity market. As regards the extent of this integration, however, the results are often inconclusive. Further analysis calls for a closer scrutiny of the basic...

Stock prices move together more in low-income economies than in high-income economies. This finding is clearly not due to market size differences, and only partially explained by slightly higher fundamentals correlation in low-income economies. However, measures of a country's institutionalized...