We decompose an annual average years of schooling series for Portugal into different schooling levels series. By estimating a number of vector autoregressions, we provide measures of aggregate and disaggregate economic growth impacts of different education levels. Increasing education at all...

We review the main budgetary measures not accepted by the Portuguese Constitutional Court in the Budget Laws of 2012, 2013 and 2014. Considering the feedback effect of the fiscal impulse, the impact on the budget balance is -0.42% and of -0.34% of GDP respectively for 2013 and for 2014; in both...

Legal simplification may improve the quality of institutions in industrialised countries that developed over-complex legal systems. In theory, this type of regulatory reform promotes economic efficiency, leading to higher levels of productivity and output. In this paper we use a Panel...

Two sources of asymmetry in the Phillips curve are considered: the "capacity constraint hypothesis" and downward rigidity on wages and/or prices. The short run trade-off between inflation changes and the unemployment gap is modeled in a state-space framework that allows for time variation in...

In a cross section of OECD countries we replace the macroeconomic production function by a production possibility frontier, TFP being the composite effect of efficiency scores and possibility frontier changes. We consider, for the periods 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, one output: GDP per worker; three...

The impact of human and public capital on growth is a major issue in economic theory and in policy evaluation. Using a cointegrated VAR, we estimate a Cobb-Douglas production function for Portugal with public and human capital. Return rates are then computed with and without dynamic feedbacks....

Endogenous, ideas-led, growth theory and agent based modelling with neighbourhood effects literature are crossed. In an economic overlapping generations framework, it is shown how social interactions and neighbourhood effects are of vital importance in the endogenous determination of the long...

We address the efficiency of expenditure in education provision by comparing the output (PISA results) from the educational system of 25, mostly OECD, countries with resources employed (teachers per student, time spent at school). We estimate a semi-parametric model of the education production...

Pereira’s (2000) method of computing the return on public investment in a VAR is extended. A new return measure which accounts for public and private costs is proposed. An application to US data shows non-trivial differences between alternative return rates.

This paper surveys the recent literature on law and order efficiency measurement. Law and order services include the services provided by the police, by the prison system and also by the judicial system (“the courts”). Key concepts prevalent in the efficiency measurement literature are...