This paper investigates the relationship between the diffusion of EU standards and product quality upgrading using highly disaggregated import data to the EU in the food industry. Results show that, on average, the diffusion of EU voluntary standards boosts the rate of quality upgrading. However...

Melitz and Ottaviano's (2008) firm-heterogeneity model predicts that trade liberalization induces a selection process from low to high productivity firms, which translates to an industry productivity growth. A similar firms' selection effect is induced by market size. In this paper, these...

Adoption of yield - increasing technologies is seen as a key driver to increase agricultural production in Sub-Saharan Africa. There is, however, a lack of empirical evidence on the impact of programs aiming to scale-up the adoption of improved technologies from research settings to the farm...

Weather shocks and natural disasters, it has been argued, represent a major threat to national and international security. Our paper contributes to the emerging micro-level strand of the literature on the link between local variations in weather shocks and conflict by focusing on a pixel-level...

For decades, despite widespread hunger and severe malnutrition in developing countries there was little attention to agricultural development and food security, and global funding for it was declining. High and volatile food prices have caused a dramatic turnaround in public and political...

This paper empirically accounts for the importance of the 'global supply chains' concept for export restructuring and productivity growth in Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) in the period 1995-2007. Using industry-level data and accounting for technology intensity, we show that FDI...

In this paper we examine the reasons behind the remarkable export performance of transition economies in the last two decades. Following Redding and Venables (2004, 2004a) and Fugazza (2004), we decompose export performance into the gains due to the advantageous access to foreign markets and...

Retailers' private standards are increasingly important in addressing consumer concerns about safety, quality and social and environmental issues. Empirical evidence shows that these private standards are frequently more stringent than their public counterparts. This article develops a political...

This paper provides evidence on private standards on genetically modified (GM) organisms for 44 retailers operating in 54 countries, distinguishing between retailers not using GM ingredients, and retailers using ingredients which are potentially GM in private label products. Using this...

We reviewed all articles reporting on job creation and job destruction by companies in Germany between December 2000 and September 2008 in Die Welt, one of the leading German newspapers, using experiments to test our selection criteria. There is a large difference in coverage of job creation and...