Grade retention practices are at the forefront of the educational debate. In this paper, we use PISA 2009 data for Spain to measure the effect of grade retention on students’achievement. One important problem when analyzing this question is that school outcomes and the propensity to repeat a...

This article analyzes empirically the main existing theories on income and population city growth: increasing returns to scale, locational fundamentals and random growth. To do this we implement a threshold nonlinearity test that extends standard linear growth regression models to a dataset on...

Decentralized fiscal decision making is more likely to be optimal if regional tax bases are non-rival, in the sense that one region's gain is no other relevant region's loss. We develop a method for estimating the rivalness of tax bases using the underlying structures of the conditional logit,...

The absence of a competitive market and the presence and strength of public-sector labor unions make it likely that public-sector pay reflects an element of rent extraction by government workers. In this paper, we test a specific hypothesis that connects such rent extraction to the level of...

We build a simple model of secession crises where a majority of voters may wish to accommodate the minority in order to prevent a secession attempt. We first show the existence of a majority voting equilibrium, where the median voter is decisive and most prefers a government’s type that is...

Using Labour Force Survey individual-level data recently released by the Italian Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) where information is for the first time at available at provincial level, this paper looks at the short-term effects of the L’Aquila earthquake on labour market outcomes. Our...

Although not exclusive to the Republic of Korea’s educational system, the pervasiveness of private tutoring, and its consequences, serve to distinguish it from systems operated in other countries. However, the identification of inefficiencies linked to this phenomenon have seen the educational...

The paper assesses the performance of the technology licensing offices (TLO) and technology transfer offices (TTO) which have been active in Portuguese higher education institutions. Data stemming from a survey of these entities was analyzed in successive steps through factor analysis, cluster...

In 2009 the European Council published its Europe 2020 Strategy in which it fixed a number of social, educational and economic targets to be achieved by 2020. However, given the current economic crisis, the majority of European countries are struggling to attain these goals. In this framework,...

The empirical investigation into the economic relevance of knowledge codification lacks behind the allied theoretical contributions. The article empirically examines the link between codifiable work content and code-based technologies. For this purpose, we use detailed information about the...