Labor Market Interactions Between Legal and Illegal Immigrants

The paper looks at the situation of legal immigrants who employ illegal immigrants for various services. This enables the legal immigrants to allocate more time to other work, thereby increasing their earnings. Illegal immigrants employed by legal immigrants may specialize in certain professions and may themselves employ other illegal immigrants. A subeconomy evolves whose sole purpose is the provision of services by illegal immigrants for legal immigrants.     

Distribution dynamics: stratification, polarization, and convergence among OECD economies, 1870-1992

Using a distribution dynamics approach, the growth experience of 17 OECD economies is investigated. After explaining the distribution dynamics approach, the empirical analysis examines both the observed period dynamics and the unique long-run equilibrium associated with three periods. This study suggests persistence and stratification, not convergence, characterized the pre-1914 regime, whereas convergence was the key feature of the post-war regime. However, a larger sample of OECD economies in the post-war period indicates that convergence was primarily a feature of the Golden Age and in the post-Golden Age period separation, polarization, and divergence came to the fore.     

Compromising the compromise effect: Brands matter

Consumer behavior research has a long history indicating that preferences are influenced by the relative positions of members of a choice set. The realism of this work, however, is somewhat limited because alternatives are typically labeled with letters rather than with real brand names. We investigate the boundaries of prior research by testing whether preferences for alternatives in compromise and superior positions generalize to a more realistic market scenario that includes choices between real brands. In particular, we conduct two studies that examine if preferences for brands in a choice set are moderated by the inclusion of more or less familiar brand names. We find that consumers prefer extreme brands when compromise brands are relatively less familiar and compromise brands when they are relatively more familiar. In this scenario brand familiarity and not the position of the alternatives determine choice. In situations where a choice alternative is superior, we find no moderation due to brand familiarity.

Doing Well by Doing Good? Community Development Venture Capital

This paper examines the investments and performance of community development venture capital (CDVC). We find substantial differences between CDVCs and traditional VCs: CDVC investments are far more likely to be in nonmetropolitan regions and in regions with little prior venture activity. CDVC investments are likely to be in earlier stage investments and in industries outside the venture capital mainstream that have lower probabilities of successful exit. Even after controlling for this unattractive transaction mixture, the probability of a CDVC investment being successfully exited is lower. One benefit of CDVCs may be their effect in bringing traditional VCs to underserved regions—controlling for the presence of traditional VC investments, each additional CDVC investment results in an additional 0.06 new traditional VC firms in a region.     

Environmental Duties and International Harmonization of Standards

Demands by domestic industries for protection from foreign competition aided by lower standards have led to proposals to set trade barriers conditional on the environmental policies of other countries. This article shows that the threat of such environmental duties can assist in achieving global efficiency when countries cannot commit to a negotiated environmental standard. In addition, this article shows that, in a repeated game framework, the enforcement of a free-trade agreement may require some convergence in environmental standards across countries when trade is driven by differences in such standards. However, it is also shown that it is more efficient to enforce a trade agreement by setting tariffs to partially offset differences in policy standards than to attempt to harmonize standards within environmental side agreements.     

The rules of standard‐setting organizations: an empirical analysis

This article empirically explores standard‐setting organizations' policy choices. Consistent with our earlier theoretical work, we find (i) a negative relationship between the extent to which an SSO is oriented to technology sponsors and the concession level required of sponsors and (ii) a positive correlation between the sponsor friendliness of the selected SSO and the quality of the standard. We also develop and test two extensions of the earlier model: the presence of provisions mandating royalty‐free licensing is negatively associated with disclosure requirements, and the relationship between concessions and user friendliness is weaker when there is only a limited number of SSOs.     

Endogenous firm heterogeneity and the dynamics of trade liberalization

In this paper, we build a dynamic model with endogenous firm-level productivity that involves ex ante identical firms behaving differently in equilibrium. Heterogeneity arises in equilibrium as firms choose different dates to adopt a new technology. We investigate the effects of international trade on technological diffusion and show that trade has a generally positive impact on the equilibrium rate of adoption (and hence on firm-level productivity). In addition, the model can replicate the stylized fact that exporters are larger and more productive than non-exporters. Finally, we show how our model can be used to interpret the emerging empirical evidence on the firm-level productivity effects of CUSFTA.     

The determinants and evaluation of merger success

Many decry the preponderance of merger failures and conclude that mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are failed strategies. However, analysis of the causes of failure has often been shallow and the measures of success weak. The research reported here focuses on what makes a merger successful and what is the appropriate manner of evaluating merger success. Extensive field research of the merger of J.P. Morgan and Chase Manhattan Bank in 2000 is used to illustrate the drivers of merger success and how to improve and value the contributions of mergers.