We posit that comparative advantage is discovered via alternative transactional regimes of trading. Transactional regimes are performative, based on different forms of embedded agency. The theory is applied on a study of Brazilian coffee business which manifests the increasing importance of...

This paper develops a two-sector R&D-based growth model with congestion effects from increasing urban population density. We show that endogenous technologicalprogress causes structural change if there are positive productivity spillovers from the modern to the traditional sector and Engel’s...

While most countries have harmonized intellectual property rights (IPR) legislation, the dispute about the optimal level of IPR-enforcement remains. This paper develops an endogenous growth framework with two open economies satisfying the classical North-South assumptions to study (a)...

This paper offers a concise survey on the literature of growth empirics applying to DCs. It is argued that there is a number of important stylised facts of economic growth relevant to DCs which are not included in the corresponding lists of Kaldor and Romer. In contrary to the usual procedure,...

In many situations the individuals who can generate some output must enter a contest for appropriating this output. This paper analyses the investment incentives of such agents and the role of incumbency advantages in the contest. Depending on the advantages, an increase in the productivity of...

The United States provides a unique laboratory for understanding how the cultural, institutional, and human capital endowments of immigrant groups shape economic outcomes. In this paper, we use census micro-sample information to reconstruct the country-of-ancestry distribution for US counties...

The dynamics of drug launch has been an under-researched area. Most of the studies in this field focus on developed countries, quite uniform in terms of disease profile and regulatory framework, and analyse whether stringency in regulation influences launch delay. Developing countries, in...

How have house prices evolved in the long-run? This paper presents, for the first time, annual house prices for 14 advanced economies since 1870. Based on extensive data collection, we show that the past decades have seen a historically unprecedented boom in global house prices. Real house...

In many industries, the number of firms evolves non-monotonically over time. A phase of rapid entry is followed by an industry shakeout: a large number of firms exit within a short period. We present a simple timing game of entry and exit with an exogenous technological process governing firm...

The convergence debate of whether poorer countries are catching up with richer ones has recently focused on the concept of club convergence, hence convergence within groups of countries. Formally detecting club convergence in the distribution of countries' income per capita over time has,...