This paper re-examines the innovation-productivity nexus on the basis of a paired comparison between Catalonia's food and auto sectors. The sectoral studies expose a set of productivity enhancement mechanisms that do not involve innovation in the sense of anything new to the world, that are...

Recent years have seen a surge of interest among industrial organization economists in using data on international trade flows as windows into competitiveness. For countries that are at least mid-sized (e.g., Spain), interregional trade tends to be as large as or significantly larger than...

Game theory has come to dominate industrial organization economics, but business strategists continue to debate its usefulness. So far, empirical work on the application of game theory to business strategy has been too limited to force a consensus. As a (partial) remedy, Games Businesses Play...

Diversified business groups dominate the private sectors of most of the world's economies. Several of these economies have undergone sudden policy changes that significantly increase domestic competitive intensity. The authors demonstrate how the changes in corporate scope that accompany such...

This paper analyzes a dynamic mixed duopoly in which a profit-maximizing competitor interacts with a competitor that prices at zero (or marginal cost), with the cumulation of output affecting their relative positions over time. The modeling effort is motivated by interactions between Linux, an...

If markets were either completely isolated by or integrated across borders, there would be little room for international business strategy to have content distinctive from ‘mainstream’ strategy. But a review of the economic evidence about the international integration of markets indicates...

This paper studies a new frontier in the understanding of International Strategy (IS). To explore it, we propose the analogy of the ecology of firms and places as a way to emphasize that the real problem is the colocation of different places with different types of firms. Locations are in fact...

This paper is based on a panel we organized at the "First Annual Conference on Emerging Research Frontiers in International Business Studies", organized by the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS), to discuss several new lines of research in international strategy. Four lines of...

Efficiency has been defined in at least two different ways: in terms of the refinement of existing products, processes or capabilities (static efficiency) or the development of new ones (dynamic efficiency). This paper analyzes the organizational trade-off between these two forms of efficiency....