This paper explores the causes of skill-based employment differentials within the Turkish manufacturing sector over the period 1980-2001. Turkey is taken as an example of a developing economy that, in that period, had been technologically advancing and becoming increasingly integrated with the...

Sub-Sahara African countries have had a checkered past when it comes to good governance and institutions. Increasingly, economists and policy makers are recognizing the importance of governance and institutions for economic growth and development. The New Partnership for Africa’s Development...

This paper develops a nonparametric analysis for the sharp regression discontinuity (RD) design in which the continuous forcing variable may contain measurement error. We show that if the observable forcing variable contains measurement error, this error causes severe identification bias for the...

In this paper, we examine global trajectories, dynamics, and tendencies of software piracy to ease the benchmarking of current efforts towards harmonizing the standards and enforcements of Intellectual Property Rights (henceforth IPRs) protection worldwide. Our empirical exercise is based on 15...

Having access to foreign investment allows a country to acquire opportunities that otherwise could not be had. Many factors are important for attracting investment in developing countries, but there has been only a limited consensus on which factors play an unambiguous role. Using different...

This paper looks at the effects of demand uncertainty and stagnancy on firms’ decisions to engage in R&D activities and the amount of financial effort devoted to such activities. In so doing, the paper makes a number of contributions to the innovation literature: first, it adds to the recently...

We explore a wide range of macroeconomic, fiscal and institutional factors in order to assess their relevance as determinants of financial development in MENA countries. A first interesting result is that bank and non-bank development are affected differently by the determinants under...

This paper studies the demand for tobacco products in post-unification Italy. We construct a very detailed panel dataset of annual consumption in the 69 Italian provinces from 1871 to 1913, which is then used to estimate the demand for tobacco products. We find support for the Becker and Murphy...

Spatial econometric models are now an established tool for measuring spillover effects between geographical entities. Unfortunately, however, when entities share common borders but are subject to different institutional frameworks, unless this is taken into account the conclusions may be...