This paper investigates the relationship between the diffusion of EU standards and product quality upgrading using highly disaggregated import data to the EU in the food industry. Results show that, on average, the diffusion of EU voluntary standards boosts the rate of quality upgrading....

An inventor can invest research effort to come up with an innovation. Once an innovation is made, a contract is negotiated and unobservable effort must be exerted to develop a product. In the absence of liability constraints, the inventor’s investment incentives are increasing in his...

Using firm level data from the Irish Community Innovation Survey 2008–2010 we analyse the importance of eight skill sets for the innovation performance of firms. We distinguish between radical and incremental innovation. Our results suggest that there is substantial heterogeneity in the...

We propose a model of production where technical change is both time and management induced. We define a general management index in addition to the general time index of Baltagi and Griffin (1988) and use them as arguments in the translog production function. Time and management induced...

We estimate panel vector autoregressions to analyze the highly disputed relationship between sovereign debt and economic growth. Using data on 20 developed countries, we find no evidence for a robust effect of debt on growth, even for higher levels of debt. We do find a significant negative...

Alfaro, Kalemli-Ozcan, and Volosovych (2008) argue that accounting for differences in institutional quality makes the Lucas Paradox disappear. We show that their key finding is driven by the presence of outliers. Once we control for them, we find that the Lucas Paradox remains.

We examine the link between pre-colonial statehood and contemporary regional African development, as reflected in satellite images on light density at night. We employ a variety of historical maps to capture the former. Our within-country analysis reveals a strong positive correlation between...

This paper shows that the degree of ancestral individualism is positively related to annual earnings across second-generation US immigrants. This provides evidence in favor of Gorodnichenko and Roland’s (2011b) hypothesis that the individualistic dimension of culture is important for long-term...

We show how technological leader gains from inviting an entrant into R&D competition to improve over existing patented technology, as the entrant takes complementary R&D effort, and the demand for both current and improved technologies is increasing with aggregate probability for successful...

I demonstrate that providing information about product quality is not necessarily the best way to address asymmetric information problems when markets are imperfectly competitive. In a vertical differentiation model I show that a Minimum Quality Standard, which retains asymmetric information,...