This paper shows that in ation in industrialized countries is largely a global phenomenon. First, the inflation rates of 22 OECD countries have a common factor that alone accounts for nearly 70 percent of their variance. This large variance share that is associated with Global Inflation is not...

Can green growth policies help protect the environment while keeping the industry growing and infrastructure expanding? This study applies Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) method on the 50-years' time series data, from 1967 to 2015, of Kitakyushu City, Japan, and found mixed evidence for...

Collective skill formation systems were central to sustaining a high-road approach to economic development in industrial societies while maintaining social inclusion. But can they still deliver in knowledge-based societies, both economically and socially? This article argues that nothing...

Cross-country differences of market hours in 17 countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development are mainly due to the hours of women, especially low-skilled women. This paper develops a model to account for the gender-skill differences in market hours across...

How have labor market institutions and welfare-state transfers affected jobs and productivity in Western Europe, relative to industrialized Pacific Rim countries? Many studies have tackled this question, with mixed and often unclear results. This paper proposes an eclectic comparative economic...

There are alternative methods of estimating capital stock for a benchmark year. However, these methods are costly and time-consuming, requiring the gathering of much basic information as well as the use of some convenient assumptions and guesses. In addition, a way is needed of checking whether...

This paper analyses the role of banks in financing SMEs in Britain and Germany. It applies a sociological institutionalist approach to understand how banks construct and manage risk, relating to SME business. The empirical analysis is based on the results of a comparative survey of a sample of...

How do radical reforms of the state shape economic development over time? In 1790, France's first Constituent Assembly overhauled the kingdom's organization to set up new administrative entities and local capitals. In a subset of departments, new capitals were chosen quasi-randomly as the...

We use the 1952 Swedish municipal amalgamation reform to study free-riding and the common pool problem in politics. We expect municipalities that were affected by the reform to increase their debt in anticipation of a merger, and this effect to be larger if they were merged with many other...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the optimal scale of local jurisdictions (cantons) in Switzerland applying Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to the years 2000 to 2004. Aggregate output performance indicators for four local government activities (administration, education, health, and...