The European Union and its Member States have been engaged in product market reforms over a long period with notable reforms including the Single Market Program and the Lisbon Agenda launched in March 2000. Product market reforms are seen as exerting both a direct and an indirect impact on...

This paper presents a procedure for clustering analysis that combines Kohone’s Self organizing Feature Map (SOFM) and statistical schemes. The idea is to cluster the data in two stages: run SOFM and then minimize the segmentation dispersion. The advantages of proposed procedure will be...

Using panel regression for the period 1970-2000 the paper analyzes whether globalization has influenced the OECD countries’ social and overall spending as well as their tax rates on labor, consumption and capital. Accounting for potential endogeneity of the regressors, the results show that...

We describe the relation between welfare growth and productivity growth. We argue that differences in productivity and productivity growth between sectors or countries are irrelevant from a policy perspective. Specialisation is based on the comparative advantages of countries. Since, by nature,...

This paper proposes an evolutionary betting mechanism that refers to scientists' academic reputation. The mechanism provides incentives for theoretical and empirical researchers to work on joint projects, thereby producing more general findings and stylized facts that can be used in giving...

The evolution of the economy of Puerto Rico has been characterized by a long period of economic instability, decelerating therefore the economic activity, in most of the studied years. For such reason, in this work, by means of the creation of binary choice models, the factors that affect the...

Environmental economics assumes that reliance on price signals, adjusted for externalities, normally leads to efficient solutions to environmental problems. We explore a limiting case, when market volatility created “mixed signals”: waste paper and other recycled materials were briefly worth...

This paper provides a simple matching model in which unemployed workers and employers in large firms can be matched together through social networks or through more "formal" methods of search. We show that networks do not necessarily add new externalities and that some results previously...

This article provides a detailed critical analysis of the economic policy implemented by the Algerian Governments between 1999 and 2002 (under the presidency of Abdelaziz Bouteflika), of its results, and of the advance of their structural reforms program. In this context, the social base of...

The Coasean way to deal with the cooperation failure that is implicit in Pareto inefficiency is to remove or lessen the obstacles to cooperation through the attribution of property rights and the elimination or reduction of transaction costs. The relevance of this approach is however undermined...