Migration always played an important role in Dutch society. However, little quantitative evidence on its effect on economic development is known for the period before the twentieth century even though some stories exist about their effect on the Golden Age. Applying a VAR analysis on a new...

type="main" <p>A new dataset for charting the development of global inequality between 1820 and 2000 is presented, based on a large variety of sources and methods for estimating (gross household) income inequality. On this basis we estimate the evolution of global income inequality over the past...</p>

This dissertation consists of three essays in process improvement and assortment planning. In the first essay, we study firm's strategies on balancing two conflicting manufacturing process improvement activities: learning and process change. Learning deepens the firm's knowledge of the...

In this dissertation we study several key issues faced by firms while introducing new products to market. The first essay looks at product rollovers: introduction of a new product generation while phasing out the old one. We study the strategic decision of dual vs. single roll jointly with...

The traditional education system in Qing China has been widely debated over the past decades. Some have argued it was efficient and furthered economic growth, while others have stressed its inefficient nature, which led to the introduction of the modern education system in the closing decades of...

Taking the early U.S. automobile industry as an example, we evaluate four competing hypotheses on regional industry agglomeration: intra-industry local externalities, inter-industry local externalities, employee spinouts, and location fixed-effects. Our findings suggest that inter-industry...

This paper investigates the impact of royalty revision on incentives and profits in a two-stage (research and development (R&D) stage and marketing stage) alliance with a marketer and an innovator. The marketer offers royalty contracts to the innovator. We find that the potential for royalty...

In the era of knowledge economy, critical knowledge and technologies are key to enterprise competition. Huawei and ZTE are well known as top Chinese communication equipment suppliers. Both have paid great attention to intellectual property protection, and have applied a great amount of patents...