The paper examines the impact of communication cost reductions on growth and welfare by means of an endogenous spatial growth model. Policy makers having to decide upon transport policies often claim certain policies such as infrastructure investments to have growth stimulating effects that...

This paper illustrates the story of the Port of Gioia Tauro, a major infrastructure investment co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund in the period 1994-1998, but whose origin dates back to the beginning of the 1970s. It draws from a recent ex-post evaluation carried out for the...

By focusing on the impacts of investment in the disaster areas for reconstruction on the demand-side effects, the purpose of this study is to measure the economic impacts and regional spillover effects of investment for reconstruction. After the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, government...

In recent years there have been frequent efforts to analyse the systems for providing public production and propose to increase the productivity and find alternative service-delivery mechanisms based on public-choice assumptions and perspectives. It is used an approach New public services, which...

Is welfare economics still possible, when preferences are endogenously determined? The answer is yes, if and only if the hypothesis of adaptive preferences is correct. If preferences satisfy the conditions of continuity, non-satiation and regularity, then adaptive preferences imply that...

Living downtown has advantages because it allows for a convenient access to a variety of shopping and leisure activities as well as disadvantages due to the difficulties in finding a parking spot when parking capacity is scarce. We formally model the trade-off in a vibrant city district between...

In many empirical Contingent Valuation studies one finds that household size, i. e. the number auf household members, is negatively correlated with stated household willingness to pay for the realization of environmental projects. This observation is rather puzzling because in larger households...

This study investigates the benefits of cash in a general context. First, we explicitly address the arguments of cash critics, who are calling for cash to be abolished altogether. Second, we show that cash plays a crucial role in the current two-tier banking system. Third, we are discussing a...

We study a matching model with heterogenous agents, nontransferable utility and search frictions. Agents differ along a continuous horizontal dimension (e.g. taste) and a discrete vertical dimension, e.g. income. All individuals prefer the highest type along the vertical trait, but have...

The introduction of the hospital reimbursement based on diagnosis related groups (DRG) in 2004 has been a conspicuous attempt to increase hospital efficiency in Germany. We analyze possible determinants of hospital performance before and after the DRG introduction. A two-stage semi-parametric...