Understanding the development of chainstores is important given the large GDP share of services and the continuing importance of chains in bringing these services to market. Service chains provide a puzzle because they take a long time to develop even when there are obvious expansion...

This paper uses loan-level data from the residential mortgage books of four Irish credit institutions, as at December 2010. The focus of the paper, is to provide an overview of the structure and condition of these housing loan books. This includes a description of borrower categories, interest...

Il metodo proposto mira ad analizzare il contesto regionale europeo (UE 15), in base agli indicatori introdotti nel Rapporto di Primavera 2004, disponibili a livello regionale, e usati a livello europeo per valutare i progressi compiuti dai diversi paesi ed in questo caso per evidenziare le best...

In smaller countries, the non-metropolitan regions are to a substantial degree linked together with the metropolitan regions through various networks. The national infrastructure and transport networks are often organised with the metropolitan region as the central hub. This creates a number of...

From the perspective of an existing retailer, the optimal size of a cluster of retail activity represents a trade-off between the marginal increases in consumer attraction from another store against the depletion of the customer base caused by an additional competitor. We estimate opening and...

This paper investigates the determinants of the productivity of independent retail stores in Sweden by focusing on the impact of market size and regional hierarchy while controlling for several store and employee characteristics over time. The analysis utilizes Swedish store-level data for the...

The paper covers seven transition countries the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania. Section 1 describes the changing patterns of value added by broad sector, showing the process of de-agrarization, de?industrialization and tertiarization which the CEECs...