Postal reform (liberalization) is occurring rapidly around the world, perhaps most notably in the EU where January 1, 2011 was the date of Full Market Opening (FMO). As a strategy for maintaining the Universal Service Obligation (USO) under FMO, several authors suggest that the sale of access to...

In 2000, government deregulation along with the introduction of the long-term insurance scheme allowed for-profit providers of at-home care for the elderly to compete directly with nonprofit operators. According to the contract failure hypothesis, we would expect consumers to prefer nonprofit...

In this note, we focus on the measure of Competitive Balance in a sport league when the size of the league varies. We construct a Competitive Balance index defined as the ratio of the actual standard deviation to the maximal standard deviation, the value of the denominator depending on the size...

The paper investigates lognormality in the context of firm size distribution for the Brazilian franchising segment. That implication of Gibrat´s law-GL is considered on a yearly basis under two settings. The evidence, for both the totality of firms and for mature firms at least 5 years old, was...

Despite a considerable amount of theoretical and empirical research in industrial organisation literature on the relationship between piracy, music sales and their antecedents, a significant gap exists for what concerns the linkage between digital music piracy and the recent success of online...

This study examines the potential benefits of social networks through the development of high school football players into big-time collegiate football stars. Many of these young men have spent 17 or 18 years surrounded and supported by family members, friends, and religious and civic...

Keynesians propose that increases in tourist arrivals are associated with an expansion in private spending through the multiplier effect. To test this hypothesis, this study augments a simple consumption function with tourist arrivals and employs the dynamic OLS method to compute the short and...

Sports betting and racetrack markets continue to be utilized by academic researchers to provide insights into theories relating to more complex speculative markets. Previous investigations have focused on testing the efficient markets hypotheses and behavioral biases of the participants. This...

Basing on Scitovsky's (1954) definition of external economies and applying the method of Caballero and Lyons (1990) to macro data of Luxembourg services industry, we find significant agglomeration forces between financial intermediaries (downstream industry) on the one hand and business services...

The aim of this paper is to measure technological spillovers between banking activities and non financial activities and in particular market services related to finance. The econometric estimations are realized within a dynamic framework due to Feder (1982). For that purpose, we use data for...