Policy efforts to revitalise entrepreneurship and investment in Spain are key to generating growth and new jobs. The government has a substantial reform program to make it easier to do business in Spain, which should in some cases be deepened. Boosting economic growth requires a new generation...

Recent research has led to the empirical regularity that firm growth rate distributions are heavy tailed. This finding implies that a few firms experience spectacular growth rates and decline, but that most firms have marginal growth rates. The literature on high growth firms shows that high...

The discussion on the causes of the Greek crisis has focused on the twin deficits: the fiscal and current-account deficit. The objective of this paper is to examine how the twin deficits came about implicating structural features of the Greek economy which contributed to the loss in...

We construct a dynamic monopolistic competition model with heterogeneous firms to study the links between firms' earnings volatility, the degree of financial constraints that they face, their survival probabilities, and their export market participation decisions. Our model predicts that more...

Measures of institutional quality are strong predictors of cross-country differences in income and productivity. The institutional economics literature has long maintained that one way institutions influence economic growth is by impacting the efficient allocation of production factors across...

Track access charges are the main driver of infrastructure costs for rail operators in the rail transport sector, accounting for up to 88 percent of costs. This paper analyzes track access charges of 28 EU countries with the respective trajectories of the company forms employing panel...

The existing literature on firm survival focuses almost exclusively on firm- and industry-level determinants. What is generally overlooked, albeit extremely important for firm survival in developing countries, is the impact of institutional quality. Using data from manufacturing firms in China...

We investigate the causal relationship between judicial efficiency and firm size across Italian municipalities exploiting spatial discontinuities in court jurisdictions for identification. The estimated coefficients suggest that the reduction of the length of civil proceedings could exert, all...

Using a sample of 330 banks in 29 African countries, this paper investigates the importance of globalization and institutional quality for bank competition. The results suggest that competition increased in the period of 2002-2005, before decreasing somewhat between 2006 and 2007 and increasing...

Track access charges are the main driver of infrastructure costs for rail operators in the rail transport sector, accounting for up to 88 percent of costs. This paper analyzes track access charges of 28 EU countries with the respective trajectories of the company forms employing panel...