The meta-frontier model technique is employed to compare the technical efficiency levels of improved and local maize seed variety farms in Ghana using a cross-sectional data from 214 farmers. The study shows that inefficiencies in maize production relate to exogenous variables considered even...

How do firms adjust their output, inventories, employment and capital in response to demandsideshocks? To understand this, we estimate a reduced-form model using firm-level panel dataand we construct a theoretical model that can match the estimated impulse-response functions.A combination of...

This paper develops a two-country, dynamic general equilibrium model with innovation contests to study the impact of globalization on the skill premium and fully-endogenous growth. Higher quality products are endogenously discovered through stochastic and sequential global innovation contests in...

The incorporation of increasing returns and imperfect competition into applied general-equilibrium (AGE) models, beginning with Harris (1984), led to much larger welfare effects from changes such as trade liberalization. But the imperfect competition side of these IO developments has often...

Permutation techniques, where one recompute the test statistic over permutations of data, have a long history in statistics and have become increasingly useful as the availability of computational power has increased. Until now, no permutation tests for examining returns to scale assumptions,...

We study business cycles with cyclical returns to scale. Contrary to tightly parameterized production functions (Cobb-Douglas and Constant Elasticity of Substitution), we empirically identify strong input complementarity that leads to procyclical returns to scale. We therefore propose a flexible...

How does import protection affect export performance? In trade models with scale economies, import liberalization can reduce industry-level exports by cutting domestic production. We show that this export destruction mechanism reduced US export growth following the permanent normalization of...

This report is divided into two main parts. Part One examines Romania's Instruments for Entrepreneurship and contains analysis conducted by the World Bank team. It culminates with recommendations to improve the functionality of the Romania's policy instruments. Part Two presents Policy...

Estimates of the number of people living in extreme poverty, as reported by the World Bank, figure prominently in international development dialogue and policy. An assumption underpinning these poverty counts is that there are no economies of scale in household size - a family of six needs three...

A key element of anti-poverty policy is the accurate identification of poor individuals. However, measuring poverty at the individual level is difficult since consumption data are typically collected at the household level. Per capita measures based on household-level data ignore both inequality...

Qualitative work has found limited use in economics largely because it is difficult to analyze at scale due to the careful reading of text and human coding it requires. This paper presents a framework with which to extend a small set of hand-coding to a much larger set of documents using natural...

This study examines the input and output of the incentive mechanism of the knowledge in knowledge alliances (KAs). Through the mathematical model and the empirical analysis, the results show that the input-output ratio of knowledge has a positive influence on the incentives in KAs, while the...

This paper overviews theoretical and empirical contributions that study political borders from an economic perspective. It reviews theories of the number and size of nations focused on the trade-off between economies of scale in public-good provision and heterogeneity of preferences over public...

Estimates of the number of people living in extreme poverty, as reported by the World Bank, figure prominently in international development dialogue and policy. An assumption underpinning these poverty counts is that there are no economies of scale in household size - a family of six needs three...

The process of industrialization was accompanied by the switch from household production to firm production. The industrialization process was also a process of population growth, the appearance of general-purpose technologies, and the expansion of international trade. This paper studies the...

We collect data on the size distribution of all U.S. corporate businesses for 100 years. We document that corporate concentration (e.g., asset share or sales share of the top 1%) has increased persistently over the past century. Rising concentration was stronger in manufacturing and mining...

This paper studies the bilateral drivers of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) between European banks. Two findings document that banks use M&A as a device to leverage their expertise rather than to diversify. (i) Following the literature on matrimonial matching by using a binary logit model, the...

In the home-care services industry, caregivers drive to visit patients scattered in a district and deliver various care services at the patient's home. We use a unique data set, with a standard panel structure, recording the hours of service and the exact number of miles traveled by each...

Permutation techniques, where one recompute the test statistic over permutations of data, have a long history in statistics and have become increasingly useful as the availability of computational power has increased. Until now, no permutation tests for examining returns to scale assumptions,...

This paper considered Bayesian Stochastic Frontier Model to analyse technical efficiency and their determinants of groundnut farmers in Ghana. The paper used a cross-sectional data of three-hundred (300) observations to obtain posterior distributions of the farmers’ technical efficiency...

We partner with a leading U.S. e-commerce retailer and develop a competitive pricing method in the context of increasing competition in online retailing. Our method allows retailers to more accurately respond to competitors' price changes at scale. First, we construct a parsimonious demand model...

Subsidization of urban public transportation systems is often motivated by economies of scale and second-best considerations such as an underpriced road alternative. We model a public transit line subject to frictions between users, users and vehicles, and vehicles. We derive the profit- and...

This paper explores the variation of foreign direct investment (FDI) regulation across industries by focusing on the policy preferences of domestic producers. I argue that the market structure of each industry plays a critical role in shaping attitudes toward restrictions on FDI by domestic...

This paper analyzes efficiency and profitability in the Swiss banking sector over the period 1997-2019. We find strong evidence for scale economies: for most banks in the sample, efficiency and profitability increase with bank size. Using an instrumental variables strategy for a subset of...

How does an increase in market size, say due to globalization, affect welfare? We study this question using a model with monopolistic competition, heterogeneous markups, and fixed costs. We characterize the change in welfare in the decentralized equilibrium, and decompose it into changes in...

Whether there are diseconomies of scale in mutual fund industry is of vital importance in academic researches as well as financial management. This paper investigates the impact of the scale of Chinese stock mutual funds on fund performance. The empirical evidence indicates that Chinese mutual...

Germany has set national greenhouse emissions targets of a 65 percent reduction below 1990 levels by 2030 and net zero emissions by 2045, along with various sectoral emissions goals. To achieve these targets, the government has introduced multi-pronged policy measures, including a national...