In this paper we provide empirical evidence on the determinants of firm start-up size using data for the manufacturing sector in Ireland, and compare our results with recent findings for Portuguese manufacturing industries (Mata and Machado, 1996). To allow for firm heterogeneity between firm...

The WTO Ministerial Conference meeting in Seattle, USA in November/December 1999 failed to launch a further round of trade negotiations. However, negotiations on further liberalisation of agricultural trade were mandated in the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture and must still be...

We explore some empirical properties of gross international investment positions. In a cross-section of countries, we find that more open countries with larger domestic financial markets tend to hold greater quantities of foreign assets and liabilities.

The analysis contained in the YHEC report indicates that the report did not consider adequately the role of competition in the market for health insurance. This is a major weakness and appears in part to be due to a late deletion of competition from the report’s final research brief by the...

This paper examines whether or not being an employer was an important determinant of individual preferences for immigration restriction in the EU member states in the eve of the 2004 enlargement. Our results do not confirm that employers were more pro-immigration than the rest by expecting a...

Many theoretical models of transition are driven by the assumption that economic decision making is subject to political constraints. In this paper we empirically test whether the winners and losers of economic reform determined voting behaviour in the first five national elections in the Czech...

The endogenous growth literature has explored the transition from a Malthusian world where real wages, living standards and labor productivity are all linked to factor endowments, to one where (endogenous) productivity change embedded in modern industrial growth breaks that link. Recently,...

In this paper, the problem of mergers and acquisitions under pro¯t uncer- tainty is considered. A two ¯rm model is developed where M&A activity is modelled as an act of risk diversi¯cation. We study the case where only the larger ¯rm engages in M&A activity and the case where both ¯rms do....

Thresholds defined on the level and change in the HHI (Herfindahl- Hirschmann Index) applied to market shares seem to be the main instrument to select notified mergers for investigation in both the EU and US. We question the use of such a selection rule in di?erentiated products industries. We...

This is a revised and extended version of the authors’ 2003 Trinity Economic Paper. It describes Hamilton’s (2001) approach to nonlinear econometric modelling and some of the methods of nonlinear optimization, as before, but adds significantly to the investigation of Hamilton’s Gauss...