Cities are at the heart of Europe. As four of every five European citizens live in urban areas, their quality of life and the quality of their environment depends upon how cities look and how they function. Cities are also places where business is done, investments are made and jobs are created....

In our paper, we test the stability of the unadjusted and adjusted Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC). Our results provide evidence in favour of the significance of the adjusted EKC hypothesis in which the impact of per capita GDP on the intensity of CO2 emissions is evaluated conditionally to...

This paper explores the trade-off between economic growth and environmental quality along two paradigms of endogenous growth theory: variety expansion (HIP) and quality improvements (VIP). We compare the policies that match the decentralised economies' paths with the optimal "strong sustainable"...

This paper views authority as the right to undertake decisions that impose externalities on other members of the organization. When only decision rights can be contractually assigned to one of the organization's stakeholders, the optimal assignment minimizes the resulting inefficiencies by...

We develop a new perspective on the boundary of the firm that is consistent with the empirical observation that the share of entrepreneurs first decreases and then increases in the course of economic development. Existing theory based on transaction costs is difficult to relate to these...

This paper builds upon a view of economic system and individual economic organization as problem-solving arrangements and presents a simple model of adaptive problem-solving driven by trial-and-error and collective selection. The institutional structure, and in particular its degree of...

This paper offers a sketch of what an economic theory of the firm would look like if it were founded on the thought of Joseph Schumpeter, particularly on Chapters 1-2 of his Theory of Economic Development. Schumpeterian analysis requires an intuitively appealing and realistic conceptualization...

Employment contracts give a principal the authority to decide flexibly which task his agent should execute. However, there is a tradeoff, first pointed out by Simon (1951), between flexibility and employer moral hazard. An employment contract allows the principal to adjust the task quickly to...

The paper takes the viewpoint of the neoinstitutional theory of the firm to analyse Germany's voluntary Dual Management System for Packaging Waste Collection and Recycling (DSD); namely, its governance structure and its contractual relations with upstream and downstream firms. Two aspects...