Market growth is driven by product innovation. Beyond functional satiation the marginal utility of product performance and variety decreases. We argue that social comparisons underlying innovation diffusion results in consumer motivations for upward assimilation toward the behavior of better...

Textiles and clothing (T&C) trade after lapse of quotas in 2005 has revealed China's overwhelming comparative advantage in the manufacture and export of T&C products. China's advantage in this sector attracted the use of trade remedies by WTO members under WTO laws, often in a manner contrary to...

This paper presents a review of advertising bans in the United States, including bans pertaining to alcohol and cigarettes. I review the laws on commercial speech as established by the Supreme Court. An economic history is presented of regulation of alcohol advertising and tobacco advertising,...

The paper describes the exchange program in between the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee and the University of Potsdam in the field of economics. It discusses in detail the development of the program, including the problems and challenges. Additionally a brief description of the curriculum is...

We argue that societies with a stronger tendency towards postmaterialist life goals tilt the tax structure towards personal income taxes and away from corporate taxation. We provide empirical evidence for this correlation in OECD countries. To address endogeneity issues we then use an...

The United States provides a unique laboratory for understanding how the cultural, institutional, and human capital endowments of immigrant groups shape economic outcomes. In this paper, we use census micro-sample information to reconstruct the country-of-ancestry distribution for US counties...

We exploit migration patterns from the UK to Australia, South Africa, and the US to investigate whether a person's decision to smoke is determined by culture. For each country, we use retrospective data to describe individual smoking trajectories over the life-course. For the UK, we use these...

This paper studies the respective influence of intergenerational transmission and the environment in shaping individual trust. Focusing on second generation immigrants in Australia and the United States, we exploit the variation in the home and in the host country to separate the effect of the...