Article history: Received 31 August 2010 Available online 14 January 2011 Explanations of Japanese technological modernization from the late nineteenth to the midtwentieth century have increasingly focused on domestic capabilities as opposed to the traditional emphasis on knowledge transfers from the West. Yet, the literature is mostly qualitative and it lacks a comparative context. This articl...

Previous studies have found that importing goods from R&D-intensive countries raises a country’s productivity. In this paper we investigate econometrically whether foreign direct investment (FDI) also transfers technology across borders. The data indicates that FDI transfers technology, but only in one direction: a country’s productivity is increased if it invests in R&D-intensive foreign count...

This paper analyzes firms’ choices regarding the geographic scope of patent protection within the European patent system. We develop an econometric model at the patent level to quantify the impact of office fees and translation costs on firms’ decision to validate a patent in a particular country once it has been granted by the EPO. These costs have been disregarded in previous studies. The res...

In this paper, I consider a specific channel through which trust between parties to an exchange can go on to affect nations’ comparative advantage in certain industries. My approach revolves around the autonomy that employers (principals) grant to workers (agents), which is a key feature of workplace organization. I hypothesize that social trust generates a comparative advantage in industries w...

Direct Evidence on Income Comparisons and their Welfare Effects This paper provides unheard direct evidence that comparisons exert a significant effect on subjective well-being. It also evaluates the relative importance of different types of benchmarks. Dynamic comparisons outweigh static ones. Internal benchmarks are more important than external reference groups. Local comparisons (to parents,...

In this paper we consider whether the effects of trade liberalisation on GDP growth are offset by changes in other policy variables, namely changes in fiscal policy. Governments increase welfare spending as a response to greater exposure to international trade. We find for a sample of developing countries that this is not the case. Countries that liberalise their trade regimes do increase their...

Does power sharing between competing elites result in franchise extension to non-elites? In this paper, we argue that competing, risk-averse elites will enfranchise non-elites as insurance against future, uncertain imbalances in relative bargaining power. We show that negligibly small changes in the bargaining power of non-elites, conditional on enfranchisment, via coalition formation, constrai...

This paper presents three new patent-based indicators of internationalisation of technology reflecting international cooperation in research and the location of research facilities of multinational firms. They witness both an increasing trend towards the globalisation of technology in the OECD area and large cross-country differences in the extent of internationalisation. An empirical analysis ...

abstract i n this paper, we investigate the existence and the nature of real exchange rate misalignment in organization of the petroleum exporting countries (opec). to do this we estimated a cross country basic real exchange rate determination model for 1990-2012 and extracted historic trend of misalignment. the results imply that all opec countries have had misalignment -of different kinds tho...