This paper contains a brief survey of recent empirical work on the performance of large companies. It tries to pull together the literature in the form of six stylized facts, illustrating them with data drawn from a single sample. The paper concludes by highlighting the issues which are thrown...

Why are some cities specialized and others diversified? What are the advantages and disadvantages of urban specialization and diversity? To what extent does the structure of cities, and the activities of firms and people in them, change over time? How does the sectoral composition of cities...

This paper examines the impact of technological innovation on wages using a panel of UK manufacturing firms. We utilize a headcount measure of major innovations between 1945-83 combined with share price and accounting information. Innovating firms are found to have higher average wages, but...

The decision of how best to appropriate the value of new economic knowledge is reached by individuals within the context of the decision-making process embedded in the principal-agent model and applied to organizations. Because new economic knowledge is not only imperfect but also inherently...

It is argued that financial innovation, in so far as it affects the technology for carrying out transactions, is endogenous, discrete and irreversible. This observation is developed to provide microfoundations for a type of `liquidity' trap and its implications of this are explored in an...

This Paper considers the financing of a research project under uncertainty about the time of completion and the probability of eventual success. The uncertainty about future success diminishes gradually with the arrival of additional funding. The entrepreneur controls the funds and can divert...

International agreements to protect the global environment are typically difficult to reach. In principle they should be profitable for all players involved in the negotiation. Even when they are profitable, however, they are often unstable due to the incentive to free-ride (enjoying the clean...

What explains the world-wide trend of pro-entrepreneurial policies? We study entrepreneurial policy in a lobbying model taking into account the conflict of interest between entrepreneurs and incumbents. It is shown that international market integration leads to more pro-entrepreneurial policies....

The theoretical effects of labour regulations such as employment protection legislation (EPL) on innovation is ambiguous, and empirical evidence has thus far been inconclusive. EPL increases job security and the greater enforceability of job contracts may increase worker investment in innovative...

Using the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates, I examine how immigrants perform relative to natives in activities likely to increase U.S. productivity, according to the type of visa on which they first entered the United States. Immigrants who first entered on a student/trainee visa or a...