This papers intends to relate more closely corporate governance, industry dynamics and firms performance. In this perspective, it focuses on the impact of applying the normative, best pratice, shareholder value model of corporate governance on industry dynamics and related performance measured...

In this paper we compare static and dynamic features of trade in goods and trade in services at the micro level. By using data from the same country, Belgium, and by making use of a common definition of transaction, we are able to enrich the existing qualitative comparisons with quantitative...

In Belgium unemployment insurance benefits can only exhaust for one category of workers : partners of workers with (replacement) labour income (mostly women) may loose their entitlement after an unemployment duration ranging from two to eight years, depending on individual characteristics. We...

There is a general presumption in urban economics that average commuting costs are increasing in city size. By analogy, it might be supposed that other spatial costs, such as distribution costs for utility services or access costs to schools and hospitals, will have the same characteristic....

We study a spatial competition model which is a variant of the celebrated Hotelling (1929) framework. One of the firm is a brick-and-mortar one while the other is on-line. Both firms sell the same product except that (constant) marginal costs may differ. Consumers going to the shop around the...

This paper provides a bird-eye overview of the history of spatial economic theory. It is organized around three main ideas (and authors): (i) land use and urban economics (Thünen), (ii) the nature of competition across space (Hotelling), and (iii) new economic geography and the emergence of...

In this paper, we study the impact of a French enterprise zones program the "Zones Franches Urbaines" (ZFUs) policy on establishments' location decisions. Our empirical analysis is based on a micro-geographic dataset which provides exhaustive information on the location of establishments in...

We propose a model with some of the main demographic, economic and institutional factors usually considered to matter in the transition to modern growth. We apply our theory to England over the period 1530-1860. We use the model to measure the impact of mortality, population density and...

We investigate how differences in set-up costs of various types affect the trade-off between global efficiency and spatial equity and show that the standard assumption of symmetry in fixed costs masks the existence of an interesting effect : the range of available varieties varies depends on the...

The transition from economic stagnation to sustained growth is often modelled thanks to “population-induced” productivity improvements, which are assumed rather than derived from primary assumptions. In this paper the effect of population on productivity is derived from optimal behavior....