Little is known about the underlying sources of gains from takeovers. Using plant-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau, I show that one source of gains is increased productivity of capital and labor in target plants. In particular, acquirers significantly reduce investments, wages, and employment in target plants, though output is unchanged relative to comparable plants. Acquirers also aggres...

By reducing the negative correlation between local prices and productivity shocks, trade liberalization changes the volatility of returns. In the context of agriculture in developing countries—where production is risky, producers are risk averse, and insurance markets are incomplete—this change in volatility may have large welfare effects. In this paper, we empirically, analytically, and quanti...

Keith Sill is a senior economist in the Research Department of the Philadelphia Fed. Our economy has become increasingly global. We import and export more than ever before. Yet, three facts about international financial transactions, when taken together, pose a puzzle. First, financial capital moves freely across country borders, at least in the case of the developed countries. Returns on simil...

This paper presents a unified analytical framework for the analysis of social security reform. It discusses reform along two dimensions: Pay-As-You-Go versus fully funded on the one hand, and actuarial versus non-actuarial on the other. Making the system more actuarial entails a trade-off between less distorted work incentives and intra-generational redistribution. Increasing the degree of fund...

Karoly Varga is Senior Research Fellow at the Sociological Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He was recently involved in an evaluation of achievement motivation training programmes in several countries on behalf of UNI DO. Since the first experiment in India by McCelland and Winter (1969), work on achievement motivation development has been attempted in various cultures, ...

We analyse the effects of transboundary pollution on trade patterns and welfare in a general equilibrium trade model. Production in a dirty industry generates pollution that negatively effects productivity, both at home and abroad, in a clean industry. Trade may lead to the spatial separation of production but the existence of transboundary pollution can offset the benefits from specialization....

In the research literature on UK take-overs there seems to be an apparent conundrum. First, it appears that, in general, the market anticipates overall equity cash flow gains from a take-over in the sense that the share price of the acquiree firm typically increases relative to some appropriately market-adjusted benchmark over the period of time from the announcement of the take-over to the dat...

Non-collusive corruption, i.e., corruption that imposes an additional burden on business activity, is particularly widespread in low-income countries. We build a macroeconomic model with credit market imperfections and heterogeneous agents to explore the roots and consequences of this type of corruption. We find that credit market imperfections, by generating rents for the incumbent entrepreneu...

A number of recent studies have examined how the difficulty of various NP-hard problems varies with simple parameters describing their structure. In particular, they have identified parameter values that distinguish regions with many hard problem instances from relatively easier ones. In this paper we continue this work by examining independent parallel search. SpecificalIy, we evaluate the spe...

JEL classification: F1 F12 We show theoretically and confirm empirically that domestic productivity has a significant impact on the demand for foreign varieties under the assumption that domestic and foreign varieties are imperfect substitutes. In particular, the demand for imported varieties ismore elastic for countries with comparative advantage. For an average good facing a median trade barr...