The authors acknowledge helpful comments from Chris Alexander and Catherine Gingell as well as feedback from presentations at the University of Lausanne and the European Trade Study Group Annual Conference in Madrid. Financial support from the Leverhulme Trust under Programme Grant F114/BF is also gratefully acknowledged.

One influential criticism of the stock market oriented U.S. financial system is that its excessive focus on short term quarterly earnings forces public firms to behave in a myopic manner. We hypothesize that if capital markets pressure listed firms to be myopic in a way that impacts efficiency, then going private (when myopia is eliminated) should cause U.S. firms to improve their establishment...

This paper calculates returns to scale and productivity growth (allowing for nonconstant returns to scale) in UK manufacturing establishments in the electronics and food industries. Our results show that foreign establishments tend to have lower returns to scale than their domestic counterparts. We also examine the effect of the acquisition of a domestic establishment by a foreign owner on retu...

PRELIMINARY AND INCOMPLETE: PLEASE DO NOT CITE Big Push models suggest that local product demand can create multiple labor market equilibria: one featuring high wages, formalization, and high demand and one with low wages, informality, and low demand. I demonstrate that minimum wages may coordinate development at the high wage equilibrium. Using data from 1990s Indonesia, where minimum wages in...

This paper analyzes whether a corporate tax cut reduces profit shifting to low-tax countries. I use firm-level data of 2,812 German corporations around the Business Tax Reform in 2008. Applying a difference-in-differences framework with a one-onone matching strategy, which compares earnings of multinational and domestic corporations, I do not find empirical evidence that even a 10 percentage po...

We examine whether editorial slant influences electoral outcomes in the context of one of the most powerful media conglomerates in US history. In the early 1900s, the Hearst newspaper empire was politically charged and considered influential. We test if the Hearst newspapers affected elections. Using a difference-in-differences and matching methodology, we find that the introduction of a Hearst...

The importance of increments to an existing highway system depends upon the values they add to the pre-existing network. Over 50 years ago, Mohring [1965] suggested this logic for planning optimal highway investment programs. Moreover he argued it could be implemented by measuring the quasi-rents generated by specific additions to an existing roadway system. To our knowledge no one has managed ...

Distorted performance measures in compensation contracts elicit suboptimal behavioral responses that may even prove to be dysfunctional (gaming). This paper applies the empirical test developed by Courty and Marschke (2008) to detect whether the widely used class of Residual Income based performance measures —such as Economic Value Added (EVA)— is distorted, leading to unintended agent behavior...

in this study, the shape and size differences between 30 samples of garra rufa and garra variabilis species captured in tigris river were investigated by using geometric morphometric methods. according to the results of this study, there is no difference between these two species in terms of size (cs); however, they are quite different from each other in terms of shape and this difference is si...