Abstract
This thesis examines various forces that affect aggregate performance. In particular, it focuses on competitive pressures and analyses their determinants.
It also analyses the importance of the human capital portfolio composition for aggregate performance. In the first chapter, I present an endogenous growth model, where the engine of growth is in-house R&D performed by high-tech firms.
In the second chapter, co-authored with Anna Kochanova, we use evidence from 21 EU countries to investigate the relationship between the country-wide uptake of high-tech goods such as telecommunications and the level of product market competition in services and goods markets. In the third chapter, co-authored with Evangelia Vourvachaki and Sergey Slobodyan, we propose a new way to differentiate horizontally across skill types in order to analyze the impact of human capital composition on aggregate economic performance.