We use variation in oil output among Brazilian municipalities to investigate the effects of resource windfalls. We find muted effects of oil through market channels: offshore oil has no effect on municipal non-oil GDP or its composition, while onshore oil has only modest effects on non-oil GDP...

Intellectual property (IP) regimes serve dual purposes: to provide incentives for the generation and commercialization of innovations and to foster dissemination and use of knowledge. An IP regime alone cannot maximize these two objectives simultaneously. After all, IP establishes incentives to...

The thesis collects four essays in the fields of competition and innovation economics. In chapter 1, we review the recent growth literature that analyses the effects of product market competition on growth. Contrary to the negative effect predicted by the early endogenous growth models, this...

Chapter 1 introduces the thesis providing an overview of the common themes and methods underlying this research. Chapter 2 reports an experiment that examines the characteristics of effective leaders in a leader-follower voluntary contributions game. We focus on two factors: leaders’...

The evaluation of economic forecasts is a substantial and important aspect of economic research, and a considerable part of such evaluation is performed by comparing competing forecasts. This thesis focuses on the development of statistical procedures in order that reliable comparison of...