the World Bank. I am greatly indebted to officials at the Ghana Statistical Office for their assistance. The research

Recent studies have suggested that firm-specific technological competence may be diversified and internationalised. We show that increases in competence increased corporate technological diversification until the early 1970s, and then again more recently. However, a new interrelationship has now emerged between the accumulation, diversification and internationalisation of technological competence, due to the formation of internationally integrated networks within firms. The empirical analysis consists of a dynamic cross-section model applied to the corporate patenting in the US, of 166 of the largest European and US industrial firms from 1901-1995. The authors wish to thank Simon Burke, Mark Casson, Ove Granstrand, Richard Nelson, Francesca Sanna-Randaccio, Ron Smith, the participants at conferences organised by MERIT, the AIB and EIBA, and three anonymous referees, for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. They are also grateful for financial support from the project on ‘Dynamic capabilities, growth and long-term competitiveness of European firms (Dynacom)’, funded under the EC’s Targeted Socio-Economic Research (TSER) programme (contract number

This paper is the first study of long-run evolution of investor protection, equity financing and corporate ownership in the U.K. over the 20 th century. Formal regulation only emerged in the second half of the century. We assess its influence on finance and ownership by comparing evolution of firms incorporating at different stages of the century. Regulation had little impact on equity issues or dispersion of ownership: even in the absence of regulation, there was a large amount of both, primarily associated with mergers. The main effect of regulation was on share trading and the market for corporate control. These results cast doubt on law and finance theories and suggest financial development in the U.K. relied more on informal relations of trust than on formal systems of regulation.

This paper has been written for the National Bureau of Economic Research Programme on the

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We propose an equilibrium model for firm size distribution in an industry with a constrained essential input. The model applies when the population of firms is small and homogeneous and the supply of the necessary input factor is perfectly inelastic. We argue that although the Gibrat assumption obtains, this does not result in the lognormal distribution because of the entries, exits and mergers of firms competing for the inelastic essential resource. Using our own thirty-two-year database of firms, we test the broken-stick, or random-ordered-interval, model that we call the Whitworth distribution, successfully applied by others to a number of data sets, including the abundances of bird species. We propose the Whitworth as the basic model of the equilibrium distribution of firm sizes for such supply-constrained industries, and find it fits our thirty-one-year database best. JEL Classification: L11.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the UK capital markets were marked by an absence of investor protection; by the end of the century, there was more extensive protection there than virtually anywhere else in the world. The UK therefore provides an exceptional laboratory for evaluating how regulation affects the development of securities markets and corporations. We investigate this question by tracing the ownership and board composition of firms incorporated around 1900 over the subsequent 100 years and comparing the pattern of ownership and control with a sample incorporated around 1960. We find that at the beginning of the century there were active securities markets, firms were able to raise substantial outside equity finance, and there was rapid dispersion of ownership even in the absence of investor protection. The introduction of investor protection in the second half of the century was not associated with greater dispersion of ownership but with more trading in share blocks. We offer an explanation as to how U.K. capital markets could flourish in the absence of investor protection. JEL Classification: G32, G34

for under contract number SBAHQ-03-Q-0015 Release Date: January 2005 The statements, findings, conclusions, and recommendations found in this study are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Office of Advocacy, the United States Small Business Administration, or the United States Government.

Cross sectional estimation of convergence regressions is known to be hazardous if there is convergence towards heterogeneous steady state values. In this paper, Monte Carlo methods are used to investigate the implications of this parameter heterogeneity problem. The cross sectional and pooled OLS estimators are compared with a panel estimator which is unaffected by heterogeneity. If there is heterogeneity, the latter outperforms both the unconditional and conditional cross sectional and pooled OLS estimators. JEL classification: C23, L11, O40 Keywords: Panel data, unit roots, convergence * Corresponding author: Department of Economics, University of Wales Swansea, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP, UK Tel: +44 (0)1792 205678 ext 4835 Fax: +44 (0)1792 295872 E-mail: j.a.goddard@swansea.ac.uk 1 CROSS SECTIONAL AND PANEL ESTIMATION OF CONVERGENCE I INTRODUCTION Empirical models which estimate a relationship of the form y iT =f(y i0 ), where y it measures the log size of some economic u...

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