More than one third of the European Union's total budget is spent on socalled Cohesion Policy via the structural funds. Its main purpose is to promote the development of the EU and to support convergence between the levels of development of the various European regions. Investigating the impact...

This paper is concerned with fiscal externalities arising from local taxation of a mobile factor. Using a panel of more 1100 local jurisdictions it provides empirical evidence on how the local tax rate as well as the tax rate in the neighborhood affect the local tax base. The results support the...

There is a growing literature on the effect of electoral competition and democratic participation on issues such as corruption and government policy. The theoretical and empirical literature suggests that electoral competition has a beneficial impact on policies. This paper studies the effects...

We examine the scope and value of targeted advertising in the magazine industry. We use data on reader characteristics at individual media, in contrast to previous work that has needed to infer this information from aggregate data. Our results show a strong relationship between subscriber...

Wage and productivity effects of training are compared to study how the training rent is shared between employers and employees. With panel data from 1996-2002, I analyse the impact of continuing training on wages and productivity in a Cobb-Douglas production framework. Using system GMM...

This paper proposes an approach to specify and estimate multiple input, multiple output production frontiers and technical efficiency using a stochastic ray frontier production model A possible model extension is to incorporate a technical efficiency effects model to allow estimation of the...

This paper proposes a generalization of the single output stochastic production frontier model. The generalization allows estimation of production frontiers and distance functions (technical efficiency) for multiple output technologies using cross section or panel data on inputs and outputs.

This paper examines the intensity of financial crises during the 1990s with a view to informing crisis prevention and mitigation policies. We compare the performance of a full Bayesian and an information-theoretic approach in addressing the econometric problems posed by the lack of a unifying...

In the productivity modelling literature, the disturbances U (representing technical inefficiency) and V (representing noise) of the composite error W=V-U of the stochastic frontier model are assumed to be independent random variables. By employing the copula approach to statistical modelling,...

The impact of technology on the demand for heterogeneous labor is controversely discussed throughout the literature. New technology which is said to favor high skilled labor and to substitute low skilled labor is often considered as the main reason for the decline in relative demand for low...