infonet-economy

The term BRICS was coined by Jim O’Neill from Goldman Sachs over a decade ago. Unlike many acronyms, this one has stuck - largely because of the growing share of the world economy associated with the emerging economic powers Brazil, India, China, Russia and South Africa (the latter being added somewhat later.) With the greater global footprint, the policy choices of these countries…

This new eBook argues that least developed countries were hard hit by these barriers. Drawing on Global Trade Alert data, it argues that these barriers reduced these nations’ exports by 30% during the period 2009 to 2013 – over a quarter of a trillion US dollars in total.

This paper examines how trade liberalization affects investments in R&D at the firm level. In a model where entrepreneurs are heterogeneous in their wealth endowment, they rely differently on external funds. In the presence of capital market imperfections, this implies heterogeneous access to external funds such that poor entrepreneurs run smaller firms, are less likely to invest…

Digital data from the political sphere is abundant, omnipresent, and more and more directly accessible through the Internet. Project Vote Smart (PVS) is a prominent example of this big public data and covers various aspects of U.S. politics in astonishing detail. Despite the vast potential of PVS’ data for political science, economics, and sociology, it is hardly used in empirical…

We study a model of growth and mass production. Firms undertake either product innovations that introduce new luxury goods for the rich; or process innovations that transform existing luxuries into mass products for the poor. A prototypical example for such a product cycle is the automobile. Initially, an exclusive product for the very rich, the automobile became affordable to the…

This paper explores the impact of rankings on individual performance in a setting of professional athletes competing for high stakes. We use data on World Cup alpine skiing for the period of 1992-2013 and exploit arguably random differences in race times to identify the causal effect of ranking positions. Our results document a significant decrease in subsequent performance among…