It is expected that the renewable share of energy generation will rise considerably in the near future. The intermittent and uncertain nature of renewable energy (RE) calls for storage and grid management technologies that can allow for increased power system flexibility. To assist policy makers...

We explore the nature of Business Groups, that is network-like forms of hierarchical organization between legally autonomous firms spanning both within and across national borders. Exploiting a unique dataset of 270,474 headquarters controlling more than 1,500,000 (domestic and foreign)...

The economic literature of property rights has been assessing the impact of different community based arrangements on the efficiency of natural resource management of specific areas. Differently, other strands of development economics and policy-oriented research have been concerned with issues...

The paper focuses in the calculation of the oil capital value in a small open economy depending on oil rents. The Venezuelan case is used as an example. In valuing the oil capital, two issues are recalled and discussed: how should the exploration costs and the capital gains be treated? It is...

There are more and more industries in which firms are specialized in the production of a component of the final good. This is especially true in high-tech industries. The basic question is why don't these firms merge ? We paradoxically show that industries which are typical candidates for...

Whereas 'traditional environmental economics' - considering pervasive 'market failure' in the form of negative externalities as the root cause of the problem of environmental degradation - argues for specific government intervention in the market process via a host of different measures to...

This paper investigates institutions for the creation and transmission of knowledge as efficient resource allocation mechanisms. By looking at Science and Technology it develops a two way classification. Science, is a non market allocation mechanism, where knowledge is treated as a pure public...

Economic theory has generally akcnowledged the role that institutions have in shaping economic space. The distinction however between physical and institutional descriptions of economic activity has not received adequate attention within the mainstream paradigm. In this paper I show how a proper...

The process of assigning property rights to land in the American Great Plains resulted in farms that were too small to be economically viable. These farms were prime contributors to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The path dependence resulting from the initial assignment of property rights on the...