Most skills acquired through on-the-job training may be specific to an occupation and therefore transferable to some but not all firms. However, economists have typically focused on skills that are either specific to a given firm or skills that are completely general. This paper explores the relationship between the size of the local market for an occupation-specific skill and job-training outc...

In this paper we investigate the factors contributing to the fall in the Lerner Index (price-cost margin) in the British electricity market during the 90s. A first stage of our analysis models the number of breaks in the Lerner Index and their dating as unknowns. Our results suggest the existence of one structural break in the time series of the Lerner Index. The break point interval includes t...

A thin market is a market with few buying or selling offers. The concept of market thinness, while general, is typically used in the context of financial markets. When the number of buying or selling offers is small, investors' trading positions are large relative to market size. Trading then requires price concessions and thus exerts an impact on prices. A thin market is characterized by low t...

This paper studies the inventive performance and profitability of small and medium sized firms (SMEs) that are “technology specialists” compared to the inventive performance and profitability of SMEs that are instead vertically-integrated. In this paper perspective, “technology specialists” are firms that specialize upstream in generating inventions and trade those inventions in disembodied for...

The transition from conventional power sources to renewable energy sources is taking place in a number of European countries. Electric energy storage has been proposed as an environmentally friendly solution to make this transition possible. This thesis analyzes the profitability of investing in a battery bank in Germany and the UK, using a real options model. The model determines the option va...