We propose a model to study the role of industry-level external economies scale in open economies. If elasticity governing strength is below inverse trade each industry, then specialization under frictionless consistent with comparative advantage, tractable even frictions, and all countries gain from trade. External lower gains except if country specializes industries high economies, they ampli...

We study a multi-sector model of growth with differences in TFP growth rates across sectors and derive sufficient conditions for the coexistence of a balanced aggregate growth path, with all aggregates growing at the same rate, and structural change, characterized by sectoral labor reallocation. The conditions needed are weak restrictions on the utility and production functions: goods should be...

Cost complementarities arise from synergies in the production of heterogeneous goods. It is shown that synergies can be accounted for in terms of shared public inputs (roughly) if and only if synergies decrease as the scope of production increases. This case of ‘‘substitutive’’ synergies is argued to be typical. The key technical tool is a novel interpretation of conjugate Moebius inversion in ...

This paper examines whether receipt of an RSA grant has a causal impact on plant TFP. To tackle the problem of self-selection into the treatment group, propensity score matching is employed. In order to control for the endogeneity of other variables in the model, estimations are performed using the system GMM estimator. The results show that for low technology manufacturing, receipt of an RSA g...

We propose a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach to estimate the impact of incentives on cost reduction. We show theoretically, and estimate empirically, that German electricity distribution system operators (DSOs) incur higher costs when subject to a loweredpowered regulation mechanism. The difference is particularly significant (about 7%) for firms in the upper quartile of the efficiency...

This document contains a report on the work carried out by the ASPeCT project on the local authentication of users to their UIMs using speaker verification techniques. It includes a summary of the technical approach, a description of the demonstrator and concludes with the results and ideas for further work. provides a report on Deliverable D24. The report on the low storage speaker verificatio...

We explore the relation between the establishment of a regulatory agency and the performance of the electricity sector. We exploit a dataset comprising firmlevel information on a representative sample of 220 electric utilities from 51 development countries for the period 1985 to 2005. Our results indicate that regulatory agencies are associated with more efficient firms and with higher social w...

The canonical model of Allingham and Sandmo (1972) predicts that firms evade taxes by optimally trading off between the costs benefits evasion. However, there is no direct evidence react to audits in this way. We conducted a large-scale field experiment collaboration with tax authority address question. sent letters 20,440 small- medium-sized collectively paid more than US$200 million per year....