This paper is part of a larger project aiming at revitalizing high development theory". It examines the roots of development economics, tracing it back to the seminal contributions of European émigrés to the UK and the US in the 1930s. Developed mainly by German speaking economists it became...

It is assumed that Marx focuses on profits that are to be realized in larger production that permits some surplus production. This understanding underpins the importance of increasing returns embedded in employment dynamics associated with larger employment bases. This organizational form not...

The Dutch drinking water sector experienced two drastic changes over the last 10 years. Firstly, in 1997, the sector association started with a voluntary benchmarking aimed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the sector. Secondly, merger activity arose. This paper develops a tailored...

The unique capital structure of commercial banking - funding production with demandable debt that participates in the economy´s payments system - affects various aspects of banking. It shapes banks´ comparative advantage in providing financial products and services to informationally opaque...

This paper explores how to incorporate banks' capital structure and risk-taking into models of production. In doing so, the paper bridges the gulf between (1) the banking literature that studies moral hazard effects of bank regulation without considering the underlying microeconomics of...

Our research as well as that by other authors has found scale economies at all sizes of banks and the largest scale economies at the largest banks - that is, larger banks are able to provide products at lower average cost than smaller banks. While the earlier literature found that scale...

Hall's (1988) approach to study price- cost margins is adapted to simultaneously estimate price- cost margins and scale economies from a panel of plant level data. The paper shows how this methodology provides a very flexible framework with only a few, economically interesting parameters to be...

Quality of service is of major economic significance in natural monopoly infrastructure industries but is generally not reflected in efficiency analysis. In this paper we present an efficiency analysis of electricity distribution networks using a sample of about 500 electricity distribution...

We propose a new methodology to estimate the share of household income accruing to children (i.e., the cost of children). Following the principle of the Rothbarth approach, the identification of the children's share requires the observation of at least one adult-specific good. However, our...