Understanding and quantifying the determinants of the number of sectors or firms exporting in a given country is of relevance for the assessment of trade policies. Estimation of models for the number of exporting sectors, however, poses a challenge because the dependent variable has both a lower...

This paper proposes an approach to proving nonparametric identification for distributions of bidders' values in asymmetric second-price auctions. I consider the case when bidders have independent private values and the only available data pertain to the winner's identity and the transaction...

This paper analyses participation in postgraduate higher education in the UK at the micro-level makes several contributions to the literature. Firstly, it describes trends in postgraduate participation in the UK. Secondly, it introduces a hitherto unavailable dataset of postgraduate tuition fees...

This paper tests for the importance of cash flow on investment in fixed capital and R&D using firm-level panel data in two countries between 1985 and 1994. For German firms, cash flow is not informative in simple econometric models of fixed investment or R&D. In identical specifications for...

This paper is concerned with semiparametric estimation of a threshold binary response model. The estimation method considered in the paper is semiparametric since the parameters for a regression function are finite-dimensional, while allowing for heteroskedasticity of unknown form. In...

Jim Tobin, who died on March 11, 2002 at the age of 84, was one of giants of economics of the second half of the twentieth century and the greatest macroeconomist of his generation. Tobin’s influence on macroeconomic theory is so pervasive - so much part of our professional ‘acquis’ - that...

Using a new data set that allows us to analyze precisely the research output in all fields of science, we show that the gap in scientific performance between Europe, especially continental Europe, and Anglo-Saxon countries, especially the USA, is large. We measure research quality by the number...

In this paper we investigate whether young people whose fathers are union members are themselves more likely to join a union. The work builds upon a large social science literature on intergenerational mobility that, to our knowledge, has not been applied to industrial relations questions. The...

This paper analyzes differences in R&D spending and in the impact of R&D on productivity between German and UK firms. We confirm that German firms spend significantly larger amounts on R&D than their UK counterparts, even after controlling for firm size and industry effects. Using a dynamic...

With increasing globalisation of knowledge, there are increased opportunities to 'learn' from the experience of policy interventions elsewhere. This paper presents evidence on the extent of international convergence in public policy, with particular focus on labour, welfare, savings and...