Commercial radio spectrum use rights in the US are traditionally assigned using licenses over large geographic areas with 10- or 15-year terms, to encourage infrastructure investment. However, such long-term licenses are difficult to reassign as more valuable uses for spectrum arise. Licenses...

By assuming Cobb-Douglas production technology, many well-known imperfectly competitive macroeconomic models of the labour market (e.g. Layard, Nickell and Jackman, 1991) imply that equilibrium unemployment is independent of the capital stock. This paper introduces a new notion of capacity into...

To my knowledge this study undertakes the first comprehensive and systematic empirical test of the hypothesis that while returns to invested capital in Sub-Saharan Africa are high compared to select Asian and South American markets, investment rates are low.  I investigate three sources:...

We study two platforms competing for members by investing in network quality.  Quality is complementary to the network size: the marginal utility generated by an additional member increases with the network's quality.  Platforms are imperfect substitutes: a share of the potential members are...

This paper examines how foreign ownership affects the investment decisions of subsidiary firms using a new dataset of listed-parent - listed-subsidiary pairs.  We find that improvements in the investment opportunities of parent firms have a negative effect on the investment of their...

China has had a remarkably high ratio of investment to output throughout the period of economic reform, surpassing almost all other economies, whether developed or developing.  The high investment rate is in turn an important proximate determinant of China's high rate of economic growth.  This...

Was the London Stock Exchange (LSE) little more than a Dickensian den of speculation, or did it make a contribution to industrial development in Interwar Britain?  The interwar stock market laboured under problems of weak disclosure, inadequate investor protection and ineffective...

The paper reviews the macroeconomic data describing the British economy during the industrial revolution and shows that they contain a story of dramatically increasing inequality between 1800 and 1840: GDP per worker rose 37%, real wages stagnated, and the profit rate doubled. The share of...