Why are some societies still poor? Recent research suggests that a country’s “genetic distance”—a measure of the time elapsed since two populations had common ancestry—from the United States is a significant predictor of development even after controlling for an ostensibly exhaustive...

We propose a tax-adjusted q model with physical and intangible assets and estimate the effect of bonus depreciation in the United States in the early 2000s. We find that investment responds moderately to tax incentives; however allowing for heterogeneity reveals that intangible-intensive firms...

The paper demonstrates the adverse effects of degressive rates, dependent on the percentiles of length of stay, in a prospective payment system with per diem payments. Using the dynamic panel data estimates with a recent nationwide administrative database for major diagnostic categories in 697...

One of the challenges facing the prior literature when examining the link between macroeconomic risks and the size (SMB), value (HML) and momentum (WML) factors is the difficulty of obtaining direct measures of macroeconomic expectations. We re-examine these relations using direct measures of...

We examine the impact of product market competition on quantity-of-capital constraints in 58 countries. Prior work shows that competition increases the costs of debt and equity, which reduce the economic profit from investment. Capital constraints, however, may prevent firms from exploiting all...

A special case of dollarization is analyzed: quotation of prices in dollars. The proposed explanation is price stickiness: when price adjustment is costly, forms can prefer to fix their prices in a stable foreign currency rather than in an unstable domestic one in order to avoid frequent price...

This paper considers an in…nitely repeated Cournot duopoly with Imperfect Monitoring. Each firm does not observe the production level of the other firm, but instead observes only a noisy private signal (the price of the product). We show that if the support of the signal is not too large,...

In the planned economy firms were made responsible for providing their workers with social services, such as housing, day care and medical care. In the transforming Russia of the 1990s, social assets were to be transferred from industrial enterprises to the public sector. The law on divestment...

Social scientists studying the determinants of entrepreneurship have emphasized three distinct perspectives: the role of institutions, the role of social networks and the role of personal characteristics. We conduct a survey from five large developing and transition economies to better...

The paper studies the effects of liberalization of imports and foreign direct investment on Russian firms. Using the firm-level data from 1995-2001, this paper finds that competition with imports and with FDI exerts a positive effect on domestic firms. This effect is weaker in the case of firms...