infonet-economy

This paper reviews the recent theoretical and empirical literature that relates education to growth, and draws some lessons for the Swedish experience. First, the “human capital accumulation” approach is discussed: agents decide, at each moment of their lives, to forego time or resources to improve their future productivity. The quality of the educational system is argued to be a…

In a pioneering approach towards the explanation of the phenomenon of “yes man” behavior in organizations, Prendergast [American Economic Review 83 (1993) 757–770] argued that incentive contracts in employment relationships generally make a worker distort his privately acquired information. This would imply that there is a trade-off between inducing a worker to exert costly effort…

This paper analyses the use of transfer pricing as a strategic device in divisionalized firms facing duopolistic price competition. When transfer prices are observable, both firms’ headquarters will charge a transfer price above the marginal cost of the intermediate product to induce their marketing managers to behave as softer competitors in the final product market. When transfer…

This paper provides a critical review of the recent literature on inequality and growth. After discussing historical and more recent distributional trends as well as empirical evidence on the relationship between inequality and growth, I focus on recent explanations of the inequality-growth puzzle. I consider both the impact of the functional and the personal distribution on long-run…

The valuation of Flexible Manufacturing Systems is one of the most frequently undertaken productivity improvement activities. In practice, the introduction of an FMS into industry must be done on the basis of cost justification. Recently developed techniques for the evaluation of the value of flexibility typically include the computation of stochastic dynamic programs. However, the…