Growth is associated with (i) shifts in the sectoral structure of the economy, (ii) changes in relative prices and (iii) the Kaldor facts. Moreover, (iv) cross-sectional data shows systematic differences in the expenditure structure across income groups. This paper presents a growth model which...

Previous research shows that technical progress at the industry level, measured by sectoral TFP growth, is more localized in continental European countries than in Anglo-Saxon coun-tries. We use EU KLEMS data sets to decompose sectoral TFP for nine European countries by means of a Malmquist...

Over millennia, mankind has used hard cash in various forms ranging from shells to gold coins and paper. More recently, cash has become unpopular in political circles, as it effectively restricts states’ power to tax (explicitly or via negative interest rates) or to survey and potentially...

What are the welfare and employment consequences of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) for developing and emerging countries? Standard quantitative models of international trade which are generally used to assess the impact of PTAs assume full employment and hence abstract from (net)...

The ex ante theory of collateral states that better informed lenders, such as informal lenders, rely less on collateral. We test this by contrasting the use of collateral between formal and informal lenders in the same market. Indeed, formal lenders rely more often on collateral, controlling for...

Although learning-by-doing is believed to be an important source of productivity growth there is limited evidence that production volume affects productivity in a causal sense. We document evidence of learning-by-doing in a high-skill profession where stakes are high; advanced cancer surgery....

Liberalized electricity markets are characterized by a fluctuating price-inelastic demand, non-storable electricity and often show substantial market shares held by one or few incumbent firms. These characteristics have led to a controversial discussion concerning the need for and the design of...

This paper proposes and empirically implements a framework for analyzing industry competition and the degree of joint profit maximization of merging firms in differentiated product industries. Using pre- and post-merger industry data, I am able to separate merging firms' intra-organizational...

We analyze dynamic price competition in a homogeneous goods duopoly, where consumers exchange information via word-of-mouth communication. A fraction of consumers, who do not learn any new information, remain locked-in at their previous supplier in each period. We analyze Markov perfect...