We study the extent to which a country's strength of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protection mediates knowledge spillovers from Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). Following the opposing views in the IPR debate, we propose a negative effect of IPR strength on unintentional horizontal...

The authors investigate the effectiveness and efficiency of alternative measures to increase standards in low-income countries. They do this in a two-country framework where (a) trade and standards in low-income countries are negatively related, and (b) free trade is no longer optimal for the...

This paper investigates the determinants of directed technical change at the firm level in the electricity generation sector. We use firm-level data on patents filed in renewable (REN) and fossil fuel (FF) technologies by 5,261 European firms over the period 1978-2006. We investigate how energy...

This paper has two aims. First, we uncover some salient components of fixed export costs, which play a crucial role in recent heterogeneous firms models of international trade. Second, we investigate whether the importance of these fixed export costs varies with the size of a firm’s...