The intensity of international transactions remains lower than could be potentially justified on the basis of transportation costs alone. This has become known as the ?mystery of the missing trade?. Transaction costs may be responsible for ?under-trading? across national borders. More...

Large shocks, such as natural disasters, are often found to have little or no effect on the equilibrium distribution of economic activity across space. Two apparently competing theoretical explanations for this phenomenon are the increasing returns theory and the locational fundamentals theory....

Structural funds are the most intensively used policy instrument by the European Union to promote economic growth in its member states and to speed up the process of convergence. This paper empirically explores the effectiveness of European Structural Funds by means of a panel data analysis for...

In recent years, a large number of studies investigated the spatial distribution of economic activities in Western Europe by means of various measures of geographical concentration. The fundamental problem with the indices currently used in the literature is that they do not take explicitly into...

The empirical economic growth literature is criticized for its lack of robustness. For different definitions of robustness, conclusions vary from ?almost every correlation is fragile? to ?a substantial number of explanatory variables are robust.? We re-analyze the empirical results of the...

In this paper we study the effectiveness of tax incentives and public transportation prices on the environmental impact of private motor vehicle use in OECD countries and in some non-OECD countries in Asia. We develop a model of energy consumption and CO2 emission by private motor vehicles in...

Does an individual’s housing situation affect community social capital and influence regional development through this channel? A body of literature which followed the seminal work of DiPasquale and Glaeser suggests that homeownership is positively related to social capital formation...

Unemployment remains a major economic and social problem in many developed economies. This paper provides theoretical and empirical perspectives on the impact of labour market deregulation as a means of combatting unemployment and of enhancing competitive wage determination. The paper focusses...

Most ‘wage curve’ studies treat local labour markets as independent ‘islands’ in the national economy. However, when a local labour market is in close proximity of other labour markets, a local shock that increases unemployment may not lead to lower pay rates if employers fear outward...