We show that the international distribution of ownership of the incumbent firms within a host region matters for the efficiency of the fiscal competition between the region’s constituent countries for a new FDI project. If incumbent firms are owned entirely within the host region, then the new...

We conduct Monte Carlo simulations of principal components analyses of unrelated time series in order to investigate whether the stationarity properties of the data matter, as they do for least-squares regression analysis. We find that for stationary series the results are standard and reflect...

It is generally believed that patent pools by complementary input suppliers make the consumers, final goods producers and the society better off by reducing the complements problem. We show that this may not be the case under endogenous technology choice. Although a patent pool reduces input...

The substantial within-industry variation in firm productivity typically observed in the data suggests that there is ample scope for catch-up by laggard firms. We analyse the normative effects of such catch-up. In the short run, where firms’ process technologies are fixed, catch-up can reduce...

When trading across borders, firms choose between dierent payment contracts. Theoretically, this should allow firms to trade-off differences in financing costs and enforcement across countries. This paper provides evidence for this hypothesis from a large number of countries. As predicted, the...

Previous studies characterize some of the Former Soviet Central Asian countries (CACs) as “more open” (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan) and others as “more isolated” (Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) depending on their trade-over-GDP level. Being an open or isolationist economy has...

This paper offers an extensive survey and a critical discussion of the empirical literature on the driving factors of R&D. These factors are subsumed under five broad types. The paper first summarises the key predictions from theory regarding each type's R&D effect. It then examines for which...

This article re-examines real interest parity (RIP), focusing upon which component of real interest parity drives convergence to parity. We find that it is the reversion of inflation rather than nominal interest rates which is the primary source of convergence to RIP. Nominal interest rate...

This paper considers the contribution of voluntary consensus based standards, as developed through the British Standards Institution (BSI), to collective learning and productivity growth in Britain. It discusses the pivotal contribution of professional engineers to the establishment of a...

Working with micro-founded loss functions to derive and analyse optimal policy ensures consistency with the model used and overcomes the misleading prescriptions that result from using exogenous ad hoc loss functions. However, when allowance is made for the fact that different theories of...