According to KENDRICK (1996, p. 1), National Accounts have become “an indispensable tool for macroeconomic analysis, projections, and policy formulation”. The paper elaborates on this statement, addressing policy domains that rely heavily on National Accounts data. Yet – useful as they are...

The paper analyzes whether the political regime of a country influences its involvement in international trade. Firstly, we develop a theoretical model that predicts that autocracies trade less than democracies. Secondly, we test the predictions of the model empirically using a panel of more...

This paper examines whether a country's economic reform are affected by reforms adopted by other countries. A simple model of economic reforms is developed to motivate the econometric work. Unsurprisingly, the model predicts that reforms are more likely when factors of production are...

Growth regression economics are haunted by the fact that results are easily overthrown by regressing alternative model specifications. Recent research therefore aims at obtaining robust regression results by systematically running multiple models and picking surviving variables. This note shows...

The paper develops a theoretical model showing a mutual relationship between corruption and capital account restrictions. According to the model, higher corruption induces stricter restrictions and vice versa. We test the model using panel data for 112 countries over the period 1984-2002 and...

The standard economy-wide indices of labor quality (or human capital) largely ignore the role of unobservable worker characteristics. In this paper, we develop a methodology for identifying the contri- butions of both observable and unobservable worker characteristics in the presence of the...

This paper investigates (a) the determinants of innovation performance and (b) the impact of innovation performance on labour productivity of Swiss manufacturing firms in the period 1994-2002. The data used in this study come from the KOF panel database and were collected in 1996, 1999 and 2002...

The paper aims at a joint analysis of inter-firm and intra-firm diffusion of technology, taking as an example E-selling and E-purchasing. The analysis is based on an encompassing model of diffusion, drawn from the literature, which is extended by considering technology-specific obstacles and...

In this study we investigated the determinants (a) of the propensity of Swiss firms to train apprentices and (b) of the intensity of apprentice training as measured by the employment share of apprentices. Innovation, firm age and competition conditions on the product market are possible...