This paper deals with the effects of European integration in the EC and EFTA on economic growth. Base regressions suggest that EC and EFTA memberships do in fact have a positive and significant effect on economic growth, and that there is no significant difference between EC and EFTA membership....

The nineteenth century witnessed dramatic improvements in the legal rights of married women. Given that these changes took place long before women gained the right to vote, they amounted to a voluntary renouncement of power by men. In this paper, we investigate men's incentives for sharing power...

This Paper analyses the production efficiency gains in terms of technology transfer and labour productivity changes caused by diverse degrees of foreign ownership. The analysis is based on a sample of 4056 domestic and foreign manufacturing firms operating in Greece in 1997. Departures from...

Simplifying entry regulation has been a popular reform since the publication of Djankov et al (2002). The inclusion of business entry indicators in the World Bank’s Doing Business project has led to an acceleration in reform: in 2003-2008, 193 reforms took place in 116 countries. A large...

This paper uses micro data from the Indonesian Census of Manufacturing to analyse the causal relationship between foreign ownership and plant productivity. To control for the possible endogeneity of the FDI decision, a difference-in-differences approach is combined with propensity score...

During the past two decades many economies have opened their retail sector to foreign direct investment, yet little is known about possible implications of such liberalization on the economies of developing host countries. Using firm-level data from Romania, this study examines how the presence...

We establish that domestically owned firms in two alternative models of emerging market economies, the Czech Republic and Russia, have not been converging to the technological frontier set by foreign owned firms. In both countries, the distance of domestic firms to the frontier grew (in all...

This paper estimates the effects of trade liberalization on plant productivity. In contrast to previous studies, we distinguish between productivity gains arising from lower tariffs on final goods relative to those on intermediate inputs. Lower output tariffs can produce productivity gains by...

This paper establishes the ability of a Real Business Cycle model to account for real exchange rate (RXR) behaviour, using UK experience as empirical focus. We show that a productivity burst simulation is capable of explaining the appreciation of RXR and its cyclical pattern observed in the...

This paper argues that domestic social conflicts are a key to understanding why growth rates lack persistence and why so many countries have experienced a growth collapse after the mid-1970s. It emphasizes, in particular, the manner in which social conflicts interact with external shocks on the...