infonet-economy

Does information processing affect individual risk-taking behaviour? This article provides evidence that professional athletes suffer from a left-digit bias when dealing with signals about differences in performance. Using data from the highly competitive field of World Cup alpine skiing for the period of 1992–2014, we show that athletes misinterpret actual differences in race times...

In the wake of ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden's surveillance revelations to the global public, and despite an unimpeded cross-border data flow and knowledge transfer being a pre-requisite for the development of the digital economy, governments around the world are increasingly tending to resort to mandatory local data storage and to restrictions and bans on data transfers in a...

A ground-breaking report by New Direction, the Foundation for European Reform, highlights the poor track record of the European Commission in holding trading partners to account.
The report's author, Professor Simon Evenett of the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, found that the Commission only attempt to tackle 20 percent of complaints reported by European industry...

The rise of the programmable web offers new opportunities for the empirically driven social sciences. The access, compilation and preparation of data from the programmable web for statistical analysis can, however, involve substantial up-front costs for the practical researcher. The R-package RWebData provides a high-level framework that allows data to be easily collected from the...

The G20’s principal task of reviving global economic growth has never been easy – it is harder now that world trade is contracting. World trade growth isn’t slowing down – the latest available monthly data compiled for this report suggests that it has been falling in volume and value terms through 2015. On average G20 exports have fallen 4.5% since world trade peaked in value in...

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...