This series spans the globe presenting leading research in economics. Perhaps it is a sign of the times that economic weapons such as sanctions seem to be as powerful as or more so than tanks. International applications and examples of economic progress are invaluable in a troubled world with economic booms bursting like so many penny balloons. Intra-industry Trade; Extending Brand Equity: The Role of Goal Congruence; Foreign Direct Investment and Dissemination of Job Opening Information in China; Testing Asymmetry in a Cointegrated-VAR-Based Labor Demand Model: Italian Evidence; Negative Externality, Tacit Bargaining and Cigarette Demand: The Case of Environmental Tobacco Smoke in Japan; Does Audit Quality Influence Post-IPO Survival?; Dynamic Arbitrage-free Asset Pricing with Proportional Transaction Costs; Knowledge Structure, Technical Progress, and Underdevelopment Trap; Paternalistic Altruism, Life-Cycle Hypothesis, and the Ricardian Equivalence; Three Approaches to Multi-dimensional Screening; Index.