This paper investigates how increases in concentration can be interrupted or reversed by changes in how firms compete on quality. We examine the U.S. hotel industry during the past half century. We document that starting in the early 1980s, quality competition came more in the form of costs that...

I quantify the importance of financial structure, labor market rigidities and industry mix for cross-country asymmetries in monetary transmission. To do so, I determine how closely the impulse responses to a monetary policy shock obtained from country-specific vectorautoregressive (VAR) models...

This paper develops an open economy firm-heterogeneous model where the combination of market rigidities and exchange rate uncertainty acts like a barrier to trade and modifies a firm's optimal choice in terms of production and pricing. The existence of price and labor rigidities, coupled with...

Recent literature proposes many variables as significant determinants of pollution. This paper gives an overview of this literature and asks which of these factors have an empirically robust impact on water and air pollution, i.e. do not depend upon the conditioning information set. For this, we...

This paper analyses the sectoral distribution of US investment across EU member countries. We attempt to determine whether investment is sectorally concentrated by country and whether there seems to be any evidence of increased sectoral specialisation in US investment as the EU market has become...

This paper investigates the causes of the shortfall in private R&D expenditure of the EU compared to the US. It shows that differences in the structure of the two economies play only a minor role in explaining the R&D gap. Instead, the European R&D shortfall is mainly caused by a negative...

The purpose of this paper is to discuss major factors behind failures and successes in structural adjustment. The analysis includes the experience of four major European countries: France, Italy, the United Kingdom and West Germany. These countries are known for diverging performances. Germany...

We discuss theoretical approaches to study the relationship between the size distribution of a nation's cities and macroeconomic growth. The discussion is based on the hypothesis of the New Growth Theory that inter-personal spillovers of education and skills determine the long-run growth of the...

This paper presents evidence on the industry effects of bank lending in Germany and identifies the industry effects of bank lending associated with changes in monetary policy and industryspecific bank credit demand. To this end, we estimate individual bank lending functions for 13 manufacturing...