We model green markets in which purchasers, either firms or consumers, have higher willingness-to-pay for less polluting goods. The effectiveness of pollution reduction policies is examined in a duopoly setting. We show that duopolists' strategic behaviour may increase pollution levels. Maximum...

Broadly speaking, pharmaceutical policy in Spain has been unable to control either the price or the volume of drugs prescribed. Limited attempts have been made to bring together the regulation of the pharmaceutical market and policies, in pursuit of the desired goals of efficiency and quality....

Broadly speaking, pharmaceutical policy in Spain has been unable to control either the price or the volume of drugs prescribed. Limited attempts have been made to bring together the regulation of the pharmaceutical market and policies, in pursuit of the desired goals of efficiency and quality....

We analyze the rise of the first socio-economic institution in history that limited fertility – long before the Demographic Transition. The "European Marriage Pattern" (EMP) raised the marriage age of women and ensured that many remained celibate, thereby reducing childbirths by up to one...

How did Europe escape the "Iron Law of Wages?" We construct a simple Malthusian model with two sectors and multiple steady states, and use it to explain why European per capita incomes and urbanization rates increased during the period 1350-1700. Productivity growth can only explain a small...

We propose a model in which economic relations and institutions in advanced and less developed economies differ as these societies have access to different amounts of information. This lack of information makes it hard to give the right incentives to managers and entrepreneurs. We argue that...

This paper has two main objectives. First, it provides a stylised description of the Catalan industrial path of the period 1830-1861. Second, it reviews the evolution of the Catalan industry in the Spanish context and, thus, can serve to describe the relative importance of the Catalan industrial...

A key aspect of industrialization is the adoption of increasing-returns-to-scale, industrial, technologies. Two other, well-documented aspects are that industrial technologies are adopted throughout intermediate-input chains and that they use intermediate inputs intensively relative to the...

Estimates for the U.S. suggest that at least in some sectors productivity enhancing reallocation is the dominant factor in accounting for producitivity growth. An open question, particularly relevant for developing countries, is whether reallocation is always productivity enhancing. It may be...

Endogenous growth theory suggests that human capital formation plays a significant role for the ‘wealth and poverty of nations.’ In contrast to previous studies which denied the role of human capital as a crucial determinant of for really long-term growth, we confirm its importance....