The present paper explores sources of technical (in)efficiency of Flemish municipalities in their production of local public goods (in the year 2000). In assessing inefficiency derivation, we focus on socio-economic and political characteristics of the municipalities as potential source. Our...

Economic efficiency – understood in terms of jurisdictions providing a maximum amount of output for a given level of inputs – is one potential means to evaluate public policies. Various approaches, however, co-exist to measure the (technical) efficiency of organizations. Given that these...

The sharp widening of yield spreads among EMU sovereign bonds in the course of the economic crisis and concerns that some EMU member countries would encounter difficulties in rolling their existing debt and funding new budget deficits have revived proposals for a common bond issuance by EMU...

We show that in a fully integrated economy, in which there is free mobility of goods and factors, each member’s share of total output will equal its shares of total stocks of productive factors (i.e., physical and human capital). We label this result the equal-share relationship. This...

We first demonstrate that, within a fully integrated economy (FIE) in which there is free mobility of goods and factors, each FIE member's share of total FIE output will equal its shares of the total FIE stock of each productive factor. This equal-share property implies that, if economic...

European economic integration is commonly believed to be incomplete, and that further reforms are needed. In this context, the union of U.S. states is considered the benchmark of complete economic integration and is often the basis for comparison regarding the extent of E.U economic integration....

This paper considers the distribution of output and productive factors among members of a fully integrated economy (FIE). We demonstrate that each member's shares of total output and of total factors will be equal. This implies that growth in shares is random. If output and factor shares evolve...

Studies routinely document that the nature of immigrant employment is largely specific: it often concentrates in non-traded goods sectors and many immigrants often have low inter-sectoral mobility. We consider these observed characteristics of immigrant employment for the question of how...