The world is experiencing a surge of international regulations aimed at limiting the development policy options of developing country governments. Of the three big agreements coming out of the Uruguay Round – on investment measures (TRIMS), trade in services (GATS), and intellectual property...

Under rational expectations and efficient markets, the news contained in public information announcements is directly impounded into prices with there being no role for trades in this process of information assimilation. This paper directly tests this assertion using transaction level exchange...

We attempt to present Denis Sargan’s work in some kind of historical perspective, in two ways. First, we discuss some previous members of the Tooke Chair of Economic Science and Statistics, which was founded in 1859 and which Sargan held. Second, we discuss one of his articles “Asymptotic...

This paper examines the ongoing changes in strategy, structure, and performance of the largest 250 non-financial firms in both Britain and Germany. To this end, publicly available firm-level data is presented at first and supplemented by the results of a questionnaire survey that was sent to the...

We propose a model of organizational decision making, in which information processing is decentralized. Our model incorporates two features of many actual organizations: aggregation entails a loss of useful information, and the decision problems of different agents interact. We assume that an...

This paper explains why some employees who favor unionization fail to join, and why others who wish to abandon union membership continue paying dues. Our explanation is based on a model where employees incur switching (search) costs when attempting to abandon (acquire) union membership....

Why has globalisation brought such large increases in exports to some countries and not to others? Stephen Redding and Anthony Venables look at the way internal geography and domestic institutions seem to be a large part of the answer.