This paper suggests that the institutional basis necessary to support efficient intemational trade is provided not only by treaties among national governments but also by international coalitions of private agents. International commercial arbitration is an important example of these private coalitions. The paper reviews the provisions and the practice of international arbitration, and presents...

The International Migration of Health Professionals Health workforce shortages in developed countries are perceived to be central drivers of health professionals’ international migration, one ramification being negative impacts on developing nations’ healthcare delivery. After a descriptive international overview, selected economic issues are discussed for developed and developing countries. He...

This paper provides new evidence that estimates obtained from aggregated data may not provide reliable estimates of average firm-level parameters, if the composition of producers with different levels of productivity changes over the business cycle. I examine plant-level data and show that, due to the countercyclical reallocation of output among heterogenous plants, productivity measures based ...

The Dynamics of Entrepreneurship: Hysteresis, Business Cycles and Government Policy This paper estimates an unobserved components model to explore the macro dynamics of entrepreneurship in Spain and the US. We ask whether entrepreneurship exhibits hysteresis, defined as a macro dynamic structure in which cyclical fluctuations have persistent effects on the natural rate of entrepreneurship. We f...

Pressure to change business education is rising. Lectures, where students listen to an expert academic should be the exception rather than the rule. A reliance on passive learning tasks reflects an informationtransmission concept of teaching which produces inferior learning outcomes. Incorporating new learning and assessment tasks can improve learning outcomes. Since technology is one source of...

This paper attempts to assess the Europe-wide systemic risk potential in banking. We employ a bivariate GARCH model to estimate conditional correlations between European bank stock indices. These correlations are used as an indication for the interdependencies amongst the banking business and hence for the systemic risk potential. We employ several tests to assess the development of the systemi...

Investment in R&D encourages innovation, which in turn, spurs economic growth. This paper presents a model to test whether that the number of patent applications is dependent on R&D expenditure, especially R&D expenditure in the business sector. This paper shows: 1) that a strong positive correlation exists between R&D expenditure and patent applications, 2) that R&D investment creates patent a...

A search-theoretic model of equilibrium unemployment is constructed and shown to be consistent with the key regularities of the labor market and business cycle. The two distinguishing features of the model are: (i) the decision to accept or reject jobs is modeled explicitly, and (ii) markets are incomplete. The model is well suited to address a number of interesting policy questions. Two such a...

The job search literature suggests that on-the-job search reduces the probability of unemployed people finding a job. However, there is little evidence that employed and unemployed job seekers are similar or apply for the same jobs. We compare employed and unemployed job seekers in terms of their individual characteristics, preferences over working hours, job-search strategies and employment hi...

We study the effects of structural changes in banking markets on the supply of credit to small businesses. Specifically, we examine whether bank mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and entry have "external" effects on small business loans by other banks in the same local markets. The results suggest modest positive external effects from these dynamic changes in competition, except that large banks ...