It is now widely accepted that one of the main challenges to Canada’s future economic prosperity is the business sector’s lagging productivity growth and innovation performance. Two factors can explain a lower intensity of business innovation at the aggregate or industry-level between two...

There has been much discussion about what issues should be included in international 'trade' negotiations. Different countries, firms and activists groups have quite different views regarding which items should (or should not) be negotiated together. Proposals run the gamut from no linking to...

We consider the multinational firm's decision on whether to enter a new market immediately via direct investment or to contract initially with a local agent and (possibly) invest later. Use of a local agent allows the multinational to avoid costly mistakes by finding out if the market is large...

There exist two approaches in the literature concerning the multinational firm's mode choice for foreign production between an owned subsidiary and a licensing contract. One approach considers environments where the firm is transferring primarily knowledge-based assets. An important assumption...

Along with the rise in income inequality in the U.S., we have observed a simultaneous move toward fiscal devolution and increased government reliance on private provision of public goods. This paper argues that these phenomena are related. We describe a model of jurisdiction and policy formation...

Almost all of the large literature on international trade with imperfect competition assumes exogenous market structures. The purpose of this paper is to develop a simple model that generates alternative market structures as Nash equilibria for different parameterizations of the basic model....

Many heavily advertised consumer products are both well established and have no obvious quality variation. A signaling explanation for advertising in these product categories is therefore not compelling. In this paper we develop a model of firm advertising based on the notion that consumer...

Many advertised products are established and have little quality variation. For these products advertising signaling explanations are unconvincing. We develop a coordination model of advertising with consumers observing ads probabilistically and never observing advertising levels. Consumers who...