London School of Economics and Political Science

About: London School of Economics and Political Science is a education organization based out in London, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Politics. The organization has 8759 authors who have published 35017 publications receiving 1436302 citations.

The Spatial Distribution of Economic Activities in the European Union

Abstract: This paper considers the spatial distribution of economic activities in the European Union. It has three main aims. (i) To describe the data that is available in the EU and give some idea of the rich spatial data sets that are fast becoming available at the national level. (ii) To present descriptive evidence on the location of aggregate activity and particular industries and to consider how these location patterns are changing over time. (iii) To consider the nature of the agglomeration and dispersion forces that determine these patterns and to contrast them to forces acting elsewhere, particularly in the U.S. Our survey suggests that much has been achieved in the wave of empirical work that has occurred in the past decade, but that much work remains to be done.

The Impact of Political Violence on Tourism Dynamic Cross-National Estimation

Abstract: The hypothesis that political violence deters tourism is mainly based on case study evidence and a few quantitative studies confined to a small sample of countries. Two estimation techniques—a fixed-effects panel estimator with contemporaneous effects only and a dynamic generalized method of moments estimator—are used to test the impact of various forms of political violence on tourism. Both models show strong evidence that human rights violations, conflict, and other politically motivated violent events negatively affect tourist arrivals. In a dynamic model, even if autocratic regimes do not resort to violence, they have lower numbers of tourist arrivals than more democratic regimes. Results also show evidence for intraregional, negative spillover, and cross-regional substitution effects.

The role of informal institutions in corporate governance: Brazil, Russia, India, and China compared

Abstract: This paper argues that the role of informal institutions is central to understanding the functioning of corporate governance. We focus on the four largest emerging markets; Brazil, Russia India and China – commonly referred to as the BRIC countries. Our analysis is based on the Helmke and Levitsky framework of informal institutions and focuses on two related aspects of corporate governance: firm ownership structures and property rights; and the relationship between firms and external investors. We argue that for China and some states of India, ‘substitutive’ informal institutions, whereby informal institutions substitute for and replace ineffective formal institutions, are critical in creating corporate governance leading to positive domestic and foreign investment. In contrast, Russia is characterized by ‘competing’ informal institutions whereby various informal mechanisms of corporate governance associated with corruption and clientelism undermine the functioning of reasonably well set-out formal institutions relating to shareholder rights and relations with investors. Finally Brazil is characterized by ‘accommodating’ informal institutions which get round the effectively enforced but restrictive formal institutions and reconcile varying objectives that are held between actors in formal and informal institutions.

The quality of ideas: measuring innovation with multiple indicators

Abstract: We model early expectations about the value and technological importance ('quality') of a patented innovation as a latent variable common to a set of four indicators: the number of patent claims, forward citations, backward citations and family size The model is estimated for four technology areas using a sample of about 8000 US patents applied for during 1960-91 We measure how much noise' each individual indicator contains and construct a more informative, composite measure of quality The variance in quality', conditional on the four indicators, is just one-third of the unconditional variance We show the variance reduction generated by subsets of indicators, and find forward citations to be particularly important Our measure of quality is significantly related to subsequent decisions to renew a patent and to litigate infringements Using patent and R&D data for 100 US manufacturing firms, we find that adjusting for quality removes much of the apparent decline in research productivity (patent counts per R&D) observed at the aggregate level