Technological skills of inventors have become important for innovation and competitiveness of firms in the knowledge based industries. With the emerging globalization, firms that make use of technological competence of inventors worldwide innovate and prosper faster. The present study examines how national or foreign firms leverage the technological competence of inventors from Asian and other ...

Transplant tourism, where patients travel to foreign countries specifically to receive a transplant, is poorly characterized. This study examined national data to determine the minimum scope of this practice. US national waiting list removal data were analyzed. Waiting list removals for transplant without a corresponding US transplant in the database were reviewed via a data validation query to...

BACKGROUND There is much concern about the migration of health professionals from developing countries, and the contribution of active recruitment to the phenomenon. One active recruitment strategy is advertisements in professional journals and other media. OBJECTIVE To establish the trends in foreign advertisements for doctors placed in the South African Medical Journal (SAMJ) from January 2...

This paper shows that banks exhibit a weaker (stronger) home bias in the extension of new loans when funding conditions in their home country improve (deteriorate). We refer to these changes in home bias as flight abroad and flight home effects, respectively, and show that they are unrelated to the better known flight to quality effect that arises during periods of market turmoil. Our results a...

Patent rewards in countries with strong patent systems and economies serve as worldwide inducements for technological progress. Due to the national treatment provisions of leading patent laws – requiring that foreign inventors be treated equally with inventors who are citizens of the countries enacting the laws – foreign inventors and companies gain access to patent-mediated market controls and...

Households living in extreme poverty face deprivations that cost millions of lives annually. Ending extreme poverty requires an understanding of poverty traps, including the effects of adverse biophysical and geographical factors, a lack of resources required for the investments needed to escape poverty, and poor governance. Policies must focus both on promoting market-oriented economic growth ...

Theory makes ambiguous predictions about the effects of bank market structure on access to external finance. Using a unique database for 74 countries and for firms of small, medium and large size we assess the effect of banking market structure on the access of firms to bank finance. We find that bank concentration increases financing obstacles, but only in countries with low levels of economic...