What follows is an expanded version of the statistical section from Chapter 3 of The Future of Large Dams: Dealing with Social, Environmental, Institutional and Political Costs. It presents a statistical analysis of resettlement outcomes associated with 50 dams in areas of the world where most future dams will be built. Living standards improved in only three of 44 cases where there was suffici...

This paper studies the conditions under which the scarcity of a factor (in particular, labor) encourages technological progress and technology adoption. In standard endogenous growth models, which feature a strong scale e¤ect, an increase in the supply of labor encourages technological progress. In contrast, the famous Habakkuk hypothesis in economic history claims that technological progress w...

The paper analyses the relationship between labour productivity, the proportion of older employees and IT intensity in firms. Using firm-level data from German manufacturing and services industries, we find that workers older than 49 are not significantly less productive than prime age workers, whereas workers younger than 30 are significantly less productive than prime age workers. There is no...

This paper analyzes how access to imported inputs affects firms in developing countries, where domestically produced high-quality inputs are relatively costly. We build an O-Ring type model with quality complementarity across input tasks, ranking tasks by their qualitysensitivity. Because high-quality inputs are relatively cheap in international markets, firms use these instead of domestic inpu...

When should a buyer of an exhaustible resource move to a substitute if only the seller knows the exact size of the remaining resource stock? We characterize stationary dynamic signalling equilibrium of this Coasian bargaining problem, and find that adjustment delays in ending the relationship and the degree of asymmetric information shape the equilibrium outcome. The Coase conjecture —the infor...

How much does US-based R&D benefit other countries and through what mechanisms? We test the "technology sourcing" hypothesis that foreign research labs located on US soil tap into US R&D spillovers and improve home country productivity. Using panels of UK and US firms matched to patent data we show that UK firms who had established a high proportion of US-based inventors by 1990 benefited dispr...

This paper analyzes the behavior of monopoly firm serving its products to two countries. The main focus of this paper is on how the product-quality choice in different markets are related with the cost structure of the firm. First, This paper examines the effects of production and R&D costs on the product quality separately, and then discusses the general case where the both costs exists. This ...

We consider a variety of vintage-capital models of a rm's choice of technology under uncertainty in the presence of adjustment costs and technology-speci c learning. Similar models have been studied in a deterministic setting. Part of our objective is to examine the robustness of the implications of the certainty models to uncertainty. Our analysis highlights the role of the speci cation of cos...

We propose a strategy to identify the complementarity or substitutability among technology bundles. Differences between the observed distribution of technology choices can be subjected to statistical tests. Combinations of technologies that occur with greater frequency than would occur under independence are complementary technologies. Combinations that occur with less frequency are substitute ...

This paper examines the impact of the outsourcing of production on the volume and composition of the home country’s research and development. We find that outsourcing decreases the process R&D of the multinational firm in large markets when it only conducts process R&D (the substitution effect between outsourcing and process R&D). Outsourcing tends to emerge as a complementary factor to product...