This study aimed at examining the merit of crop diversification as a strategy for agricultural growth in Bangladesh. Specifically, the existence of economies of diversification, scale economies and diversification efficiencies at the farm level were examined using a stochastic input-distance function approach. Results reveal strong evidence of diversification economies amongst most crop enterpr...

Mechanization of cotton harvesting began in earnest in the Soviet Union in 1958 and was expected to proceed more rapidly than the market-driven process which had begun in the USA a decade earlier. Despite high output of cotton-picking machines, the share of the crop harvested mechanically grew more slowly than in the USA. Mechanical picking was resisted at the farm level on the basis of distort...

Does greater equity ownership by institutional investors improve or inhibit innovation incentives? We present a model of career concerns where institutional ownership increases the incentives managers have to innovate through reducing informational asymmetries. We then utilize an original panel of US firms containing information on ownership, governance, managerial characteristics and innovatio...

The European Union launched a set of policies as part of its 2020 climate and energy package aimed at meeting its 20/20/20 headline targets for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. This paper evaluates how successful new-to-themarket climate change mitigation technologies (CCMT) are in helping EU member states (MS) to reach these goals and, furthermore, whether there are differences between...

Firm organization is affected by structural characteristics of the firm’s environment such as competition. However, successful informal delegation to a manager by a CEO will depend on the ability to sustain co-operation in a repeated game: the co-operative equilibrium will be more easily sustained if the parties have greater trust. To explore this hypothesis we use an innovative survey tool to ...

We consider a situation where an exhaustible-resource seller faces demand from a buyer who has a perfect substitute but there is a time-to-build delay for the substitute. We nd that in this simple framework the basic implications of the Hotelling model (1931) are reversed: over time the stock declines but supplies increase up to the point where the buyer decides to switch. Under such a threat o...

We study the problem of spreading a particular behavior among agents located in a random social network. In each period of time, neighboring agents interact strategically playing a 2 × 2 coordination game. Assuming a myopic-best response dynamics, we show that there exists a threshold for the degree of risk dominance of an action such that below that threshold, contagion of the action occurs. T...

This paper begins with a discussion of the role played by upgrading in the promotion of sustainable growth. Upgrading is discussed in two different contexts, that of industrial clusters and that of global value chains (GVCs). Drawing on global and African experiences, the paper addresses the upgrading agenda required to enable dynamic clusters to meet both domestic needs and progressively also ...

Where and why do new industries emerge? Using revisions of official industrial classifications, a central contribution of this paper is to document the fraction of workers in entirely new industries, stemming directly from technological change of the 2000s. Our findings speak to a growing concern about the U.S. economy’s capacity to create new work: we show that in 2010 only 0.5 percent of the ...

Do international trade and technological change influence how firms create incentives for human capital? I present a model that incorporates agency problems into a framework with firm heterogeneity and human capital. My model indicates that trade liberalizations and skill-biased technological change alter the way how the largest firms in an economy incentivize their managers. Increases in manag...