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Publications (30)
Blog
While growing up, I was troubled by the scale of the socioeconomic gap between the haves and the have-nots in the community around me. I saw cases where some individuals and households could afford education, quality healthcare, nice houses, nutritious food and good clothing, while others lived in...
– Rose’s Summer School experience
In developing countries in general, and Cameroon in particular, young people struggle to get the quality of education needed for upward social mobility. I started studying intergenerational mobility in the labour market in Cameroon during my Masters studies, and moved my focus area to Sierra Leone...
– Takeaways from the first UNU-WIDER Summer School
As an applied economist working as a lecturer and researcher in Nigeria, opportunities to learn and exchange ideas with peers can be few and far between. Researchers in the Global South, like myself, are often quite isolated with limited opportunities to engage with researchers at the top of our...
– Recent Innovative Developments
Conventional wisdom recommends the superiority of private ownership of enterprises. The reality confronts it with a rich diversity in ownership and governance structures. This volume examines five types of unorthodox ownership and governance form emerging in the industrial sector across major...
WIDER Symposium on Adaptive Efficiency and Evolving Diversity of Enterprise Ownership and Governance
A property rights regime covers rights to use, lease, donate, bequest, and sell assets or collect the incomes generated by assets. A clear and transparent property rights regime facilitates investment and economic growth. While private property is considered by many to be the most superior type of...
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– The Economics of La Lega and Mondragón
This paper develops a theory of endogenous league formation and considers its implications for policy in developing countries. We generalize from features of the two most prominent European co-op leagues, Mondragón and La Lega, to develop the first formal model of the endogenous formation of co...
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– Evidence from East Asia
This paper investigates the benefits and associated agency costs of using internal capital markets through affiliating with groups using data of two thousand firms from nine East Asian economies between 1994-6. We find that mature and slow-growing firms with ownership structures more likely to...
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– Evidence for Italian Public Enterprises' Investment
This study examines the effect of the hardening of the budget constraint on the investment behaviour of Italian state owned enterprises (SOEs). It carries out a natural experiment that exploits the 1987 shift of budget regimes due to the pressure of European Union economic policies on the Italian...
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– The Case of Italian State-Owned Firms and the European Union
This paper contributes to the literature on the role of decentralization in hardening the budget constraint of public enterprises. Following Qian and Roland the study adopts a ‘federalist’ approach. However, it interprets federalism as the upward devolution of domestic economic policies to a...
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– A Rent Seeking Model of China’s Township-Village Enterprises
I present a study of ownership of firms under government rent seeking. Using its control of regulated inputs, a government agency extracts rents from a manager who undertakes an investment. Such a government rent seeking activity leads to a typical hold-up problem. Government ownership is shown to...
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This paper analyzes the ‘Silicon Valley model’ as a novel economic institution in the domain of technological product system innovation such as computers. We focus on the information structural relationship as well as governance relationships between venture capitalists and a cluster of...
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– Global Perspectives
We examine the role of institutional investors in financial markets and in corporate governance. In many countries, institutional investors have become the predominant players in financial markets and their influence worldwide is growing, chiefly due to the privatization and development of pension...
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– A Comparison of the United States, Japan, and Other East Asian Economies
We document that firms in eight East Asian countries and Japan diversify into more segments and engage into more related businesses―as measured by the degree of vertical relatedness and complementarity―than firms in the USA. Using data for the 1990-6 period, we observe a trend towards complementary...
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– The British IT Consulting Industry as a Contemporary Specimen
The Internet is often anticipated to have disruptive competitive impacts, causing upstart firms to overthrow incumbent market leaders. This paper uses the UK IT consulting industry as a test case to see whether such competitive impacts of the Internet might already be occurring. Comparable possible...
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– Technology, Policy, People, and Strategies
This study explores the on-going development of a global digital economy through a case-study analysis of its impact on and prospects in South Africa. It argues that four factors are key to understanding the impact of the digital economy on a developing country: (i) the level of technology...
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The rapid development and diffusion of the information and communications technology (ICT) is the major driving force of the New Economy. While there is ample evidence to suggest that the ICT industry has contributed a great deal to the overall economic growth of the developed countries, its role in...
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