While most countries welcome (and some even subsidise) high-skilled immigrants, there is very limited evidence of their importance for domestic firms. To guide our empirical analysis, we first set up a simple theoretical model to show how foreign experts may impact on the productivity and wages...

The labour productivity differentials between manufacturing firms in Ghana and South Korea exceed those implied by macro analysis.  Median value-added per employee is nearly 40 times higher in South Korea than Ghana.  The most important single factor in explaining this difference is the...

Chinese economic growth has been spectacular in the last 30 years.  We investigate the role of International Joint Ventures with Technology Transfer agreements, an understudied area.  Technology transfer is the traditional mechanism for developing countries to "catch up" and has been a key...

This paper surveys the most popular parametric and semi-parametric estimators for Cobb-Douglas production functions arising from the econometric literature of the past two decades. We focus on the different approaches dealing with 'transmission bias' in firm-level studies, which arises from...

This paper exploits unique data that permits the matching of students` test scores in different subjects to the teachers that teach those subjects. Within-pupil (across-subject, rather than across-time) variation is used to examine whether the characteristics of different subject teachers are...

In this paper data from a school survey in India is used to ask whether there is evidence for the payment of performance related pay and whether such pay structures do impact on student achievement. It is shown that - after controlling for student ability, parental background and the resources...

List prices are not completely credible as take it or leave it prices: buyers are able to seek reductions by bargaining with firms. We show that this realisation leads to the existence of a critical threshold number of competitors in an industry which depends on fundamentals. In industries with...

This paper uses micro data from the Indonesian Census of Manufacturing to analyze the causal relationship between foreign ownership and various aspects of plant performance.  It examines the implications of foreign ownership in three different contexts: entry of foreign investors through...