European business services has witnessed about two decades of virtual productivity stagnation. The paper investigates whether this is caused by weak dynamic market selection. The time pattern of scale-related inefficiencies is used as an indicator for the effectiveness of market selection. We...

The paper proposes a new way of analysing the efficiency of dynamic market selection, based on the persistence of scale economies. The persistence of scale-related inefficiencies is used as an indicator for the effectiveness of market selection. We use a DEA method to construct the productivity...

The paper proposes a new way of analysing the efficiency of dynamic market selection, based on the persistence of scale economies. The new methodology is used to investigate the causes of stagnating productivity growth in EU business services. An efficient market ensures that more productive...

Using data from 11 EU countries, the paper investigates the impact of scale economies on labour productivity in European business services. Moreover, it analyses whether the incidence of scale sub-optimality is related to characteristics of the market or to national regulation characteristics....

In this paper, we examine the consequences of imperfect information on the pattern of transfers from parents to children. Drawing on the theory of mechanism design, we consider a model of family contract with two levels of effort. We prove that equal transfers among children are expected under...

The paper investigates whether scale effects, market structure, and regulation determine the poor productivity performance of the European business services industry. We apply parametric and nonparametric methods to estimate the productivity frontier and subsequently explain the distance of...

This paper highlights formally the interaction existing between the quality of institutional governance, the education sector and economic growth. More fundamentally, we show how the quality of institutional governance matters in giving directly the appropriate incentives for human capital...

In developing countries, empirical evidence suggests that labor unions entail a positive wage gap for unionized workers, in particular in monopolistic and publicly controlled firms. In this paper, we analyze how the presence of a labor union affects the regulation of a monopoly under asymmetric...

In this paper, we consider a two-period model of migration and remittances as implicit contract in a context of asymmetric information. Our model offers new theoretical findings with respect to the previous literature on the main determinants of remittances. According to self-interest thesis,...

In this paper , we consider an economic growth model with human capital accumulation , positive externalities and a cultural system of social norms . We show that endogenous rational emergence of this cultural belief may lead to increasing the stock of human capital and hence accelerating...