This paper investigates the long-run development of China's treaty ports from the mid-eighteenth century until today. Focusing on a sample of prefectures on the coast or on the Yangtze River, I document the dynamic development paths of treaty ports and their neighbors in alternate phases of...

There are wide and persistent differences in productivity across firms and countries. A new CEP study - conducted jointly with McKinsey & Company - uses a pioneering approach to measure management practices and assess their importance in driving these variations in economic performance.

We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from 731 medium sized manufacturing firms in Europe and the US. We find these are strongly associated with better firm performance in terms of productivity, return on capital employed (profitability), Tobin’s Q and sales...

The development of the ‘network economy’ and project-based work challenge established methods of regulating employment relationships. There appears to be an unsatisfied demand for its greater use, especially among employers, and this may be blocked by the lack of suitable contractual forms.....

This paper examines integration decisions of successive duopolists. It is shown that qualitatively the same pattern of integration emerges whether there is Cournot or Bertrand competition in the input market. The degree of integration in the industry is increasing in the size of the downstream...

This article considers the impact of European integration on industrial relations. An industrial relations regime can be understood as a tension between employment structured by market dynamics and broader social regulation, between the principles of contract and status. Economic Europeanisation...

This article suggests that it is timely to revitalise studies in the tradition of the political economy of media and communications in order to develop a critical and comprehensive analysis of the social and economic dynamics of the production and consumption of new media. Specifically, a...