This paper searches for the determinants of government-funded R&D. The goal is to disentangle whether the efficiency considerations overwhelmingly emphasized by the theoretical literature are indeed the main driving force behind public R&D expenditures. Another goal of the paper is to assess...

Social security contributions in most countries are split between employers and employees. According to standard incidence analysis, social security contributions affect employment negatively, but it is irrelevant how they are divided between employers and employees. This paper considers the...

We develop numerically stable and accurate stochastic simulation approaches for solving dynamic economic models. First, instead of standard least-squares methods, we examine a variety of alternatives, including least-squares methods using singular value decomposition and Tikhonov regularization,...

First, we propose a more efficient implementation of the Smolyak method for interpolation, namely, we show how to avoid costly evaluations of repeated basis functions in the conventional Smolyak formula. Second, we extend the Smolyak method to include anisotropic constructions; this allows us to...

We introduce an envelope condition method (ECM) for solving dynamic programming problems. The ECM method is simple to implement, dominates conventional value function iteration and is comparable in accuracy and cost to Carroll’s (2005) endogenous grid method. Codes are available.

We examine how a remedial education program for primary school-age children aaffects parental aspirations about their children’s future. Using original survey data we collected in Serbia, we investigate whether expectations on labor market perspectives and educational achievement change as a...

We present a model in which individuals choose both the level of provision of a public good and the quota of low-skilled immigrants that are allowed into the country. Individuals can supplement the public good in the private market. Immigrants affect natives through three channels: (i) the labor...

We assess gains from parallel computation on Backlight supercomputer. We find that information transfers are expensive. To make parallel computation efficient, a task per core must be sufficiently large, ranging from few seconds to one minute depending on the number of cores employed. For small...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the relationship between indicators of competitive pressure and innovation incentives using panel data of Spanish manufacturing firms for the period 1990-2006. Instead of using standard indicators of competition, such as market concentration measures or...