Outsourcing under incomplete contracts tends to generate too little investment that is specific to the bilateral relationship. In a model where there are otherwise no social motives for protection, we show that protection is helpful when the buyer trades customized inputs with a specialized domestic supplier while also buying standardized inputs from the world market. In that case, a tariff wor...

This paper used data from firms operating in twenty Latin American countries to evaluate whether firms’ perceptions about the nature and predictability of governments’ regulatory policies, the prevalence of intervention in the domestic economy, and the degree to which corruption served as an obstacle to business activity influenced firms’ growth. The paper also tested whether firms’ size or mul...

Mobile devices are vertically integrated systems that are powerful, useful platforms, but unfortunately limit user choice and lock users and developers into a particular mobile ecosystem, such as iOS or Android. We present Chameleon, a multi-persona binary compatibility architecture that allows mobile device users to run applications built for different mobile ecosystems together on the same sm...

The impact of regional emissions (e.g., domestic and international) on surface particulate matter (PM) concentrations in the Seoul Metropolitan Area (SMA), South Korea and its sensitivities to meteorology and emissions inventories are quantitatively estimated for 2014 using regional air quality modeling systems. Located on the downwind side of strong sources of anthropogenic emissions, South Ko...

The impact of regional emissions (e.g., domestic and international) on surface particulate matter (PM) concentrations in the Seoul metropolitan area (SMA), South Korea, and its sensitivities to meteorology and emissions inventories are quantitatively estimated for 2014 using regional air quality modeling systems. Located on the downwind side of strong sources of anthropogenic emissions, South K...

Political culture represents a society`s widely held, traditional values and its fundamental practices; foreign policy decision makers tend to make policies that are compatible with their society`s political culture because they share, if not all, many of those values. Among the various factors influencing Iran`s foreign policy,  the role of political culture seems to be rather underestimated. ...

The present study examines the stock return volatility relationship of emerging economies from 2007 to 2013 which also includes the financial crisis of 2008 and its impact on emerging economies of the world. For the methodology, GARCH model is used to examine the impact of news coming from US which is affecting the returns of global index S&P 500 as well as the returns generated by the indices ...

This paper analyzes the effect of foreign presence on the growth and survival of domestic firms. I separate the two opposing effects that foreign firms are expected to have on domestic firms: a negative “market stealing or crowding out” effect and a positive “technology spillover” effect. Unlike previous studies, however, which analyzed the spillover question by estimating firm production funct...

In popular discussion much has been made recently of the susceptibility of government policies to lobbying by foreigners. The general presumption has also been that such interactions have a deleterious effect on the home economy. However, it can be argued that, in a trade policy context, bending policy in a direction that would suit foreigners may not in fact be harmful: If the policy outcome a...

Using bank level data this paper examines how bank’s specific characteristics and the overall banking environment affect the profitability of commercial domestic and foreign banks operating in the 15 EU countries over the period 1995–2001. The results indicate that profitability of both domestic and foreign banks is affected not only by bank’s specific characteristics but also by financial mark...