Certain regulations in developing countries have often been cited as impediments to progress. This paper considers one facet of these regulations - labor laws - and investigates whether these have detrimental effects on firm location and investment decisions. Conventional wisdom holds that...

Acrimonious relations between employers and employees in developing countries have often been cited as impediments to progress. This article considers various measures of labor disputes and investigates whether these have detrimental effects on the location choice of new domestic investment...

This paper analyzes patterns of foreign direct investment in India. We investigate how labor conflict, credit constraints, and indicators of a state's economic health influence location decisions of foreign firms. We account for the possible endogeneity of labor conflict variables in modeling...

This paper analyzes the effects of different sources of R&D funding and patent office attributes on the patenting process. Another important contribution is modeling the effect of a random delay in the ‘pendency’ time as a stochastic process and quantifying its effect on patenting. The...

This paper studies the impact of electricity deregulation and restructuring on research and development (R&D) expenditures of investor owned utilities. The differing pace of deregulation in the fifty states provides heterogeneity in institutional structure and competitive forces, and showcases...

This paper analyzes the impact of changing market structure on environmental research expenditure by investor owned utilities in the US electricity sector for the period 1989-1997. The main finding suggests that after controlling for firm characteristics and the “greenness” of the state,...

The rate of patenting in the U.S. has exploded in the last half of the 1990s. It is widely believed that the increase in patent grants is at least partly a result of the apparent decline in examination standards. There has been little exploration, however, of the theoretical prediction that a...

We study the issue of project choice when a risk-averse agent must choose whether to invest in two projects of the same type (focus) or of different types (diversification). Projects of the same type are subject to common type-specific shocks. Hence focusing is more risky within each period, but...

This paper studies the benefits of participation in micro finance programs, and shows that although membership in these programs is an effective instrument in combating inter-seasonal consumption differences, there is a threshold level of length of participation beyond which benefits begin to...

This paper studies the benefits of participation in micro credit programs, and examines whether membership in these programs is an effective instrument in smoothing inter-seasonal consumption. We hypothesize that the benefits to participation accrue differentially over time, as more experienced...