Many recent writings in health policy have proposed that health be valued directly and in monetary terms using the new well-being valuation method. Yet there is currently no clear consensus on what the best measure of individual's experience may be for the evaluation process. To shed light on...

Recent studies have demonstrated the importance of good management for firm performance. Here, we focus on management in not-for-profits (NFPs). We present a model predicting that management quality will be lower in NFPs compared to for-profits (FPs), but that outputs may not be worse if...

Public sector employees are often said to have excessive rates of absence from work. Using representative survey data for Germany, we indeed find absenteeism of employees to be higher in the public than the private sector. The differences in the incidence and days of absence showing up in...

The idea of fiscal decentralisation has become increasingly fashionable world-wide. But every country has unique features of the intergovernmental fiscal system. In general municipal expenditures are rapidly growing in European countries. On the other hand local tax increases are not easily...

This paper investigates the development of local public finance in Germany, Switzerland, Poland and the United Kingdom. In this context important characteristics of municipal expenditures and revenues are examined in these countries. Differences in government structure (i.e. unitary or federal)...

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in governments playing increasingly prominent roles as active economic agents. However, state capitalism does not necessarily serve broad developmental purposes, and rather can be directed to supporting sectional and private interests. As the literature on...

The goal of this paper is the estimation of the effect of accidents on traffic congestion and vice versa. In order to do this, I use "big data" of highway traffic and accidents in England for the period 2007-2013. The data exhibit some remarkably stable cyclical pattern of highway traffic which...

The main goal of this paper is to provide evidence for the causal effect of the highway and railway infrastructure on the suburbanization of population in European cities. This is considered a major issue in Europe, which has never been studied before at this scale. We constructed a unique...

This paper uses highly disaggregate data to study the impact of a new metro on firm productivity. The planned-route IV methodology ensures the causality of results and a fine spatial scale detects the geographical scale of the impact. We find that within 750 meters to stations aggregate value...