We discuss political economy mechanisms which can explain the resource curse,in which an increase in the size of resource rents causes a decrease in the economy’stotal value added. We identify a number of channels through which resource rentswill alter the incentives of a political leader....

The extinction of genetic resources as a consequence of land development, especially in ‘biodiversity hot spots’like rain forests in South America or South East Asia, is becoming a serious problem - not only for local communitiesbut also for international firms in the pharmaceutical...

This paper analyses mutual causalities between crude oil price and euro / US dollar exchange rate. Instead of focusing on long-run macroeconomic linkages like the bulk of therelevant literature, the present approach takes a financial markets perspective using daily data. The fast-running...

Time consistency problems can arise when environmental taxes are employedto encourage firms to take irreversible abatement decisions. Setting a high carbontax, for instance, would induce firms to invest in low-carbon technology,yet once investment has occurred the government can then reduce the...

Carbon control policies in OECD countries commonly differentiate emission prices in favor of energy-intensiveindustries. While leakage provides a efficiency argument for differential emission pricing, the lattermay be a disguised beggar-thy-neighbor policy to exploit terms of trade. Using an...

This paper deals with modern industrial development processes of new technologies. It focuses an in-creasing complexity and interdependence of the different actors combining different knowledge assets.

This paper analyzes the relationship between the diffusion of new technologies and the decentralization of firms. Centralized control relies on the information of the principal, which we equate with publicly available information. Decentralized control, on the other hand, delegates authority to...

Several trade-based measures of product variety have recently been used implicitly torepresent states of technology, promoting long-run growth. In this paper, we define thestate of technology as the range of specialised production processes and propose thevariety of capital goods available for...

This paper investigates whether ICTs hardware and services play a complementary role inboosting economic growth. The main argument is that investments in ICTs fixed capital are anecessary but not sufficient condition leading to productivity gains, above all in late adoptercountries. Their...

We examine how information technology (IT) contributes to organizational change,labor demand, and improved productivity in the public sector using a new paneldata set of police departments covering 1987-2003. While IT adoption is associatedwith increased administrative and organizational...