After outlining what appears to be the central principle unifying the literature of the division of labour that has been expanding during the last two decades, I highlight a set of selected research topics, which appear to me to be of particular significance and therefore deserve much further...

The development of the European mortgage market, its current situation in terms of volume, growth, prices, interest rates and new products, and an analysis of mortgage integration are the focus of this paper. The recent creation of the European Mortgage Finance Agency (EMFA), as an attempt to...

This paper considers whether it is differences in technical efficiency or differences in factor endowments that explain productivity differentials in Moldovan agriculture. We compute non-parametric measures of technical efficiency for a sample of Moldovan small-holders using the four-step Data...

Transaction costs have become a major topic of research in the last decades. However, there is still a great shortage of empirical approaches to their effects on the economic performance. A short review of these empirical studies indicates that the impact of transaction costs on economic growth...

For quite a long time, network industries used to be regarded as (natural) monopolies. This was due to these industries having some special characteristics. Network externalities and economies of scale in particular justified the (natural) monopoly thesis. Recently, however, a trend towards...

Business groups in all of their manifestations are informational mechanisms for coordinating complementary activities -- for "gap filling." This is well known in the literature on business groups outside the Anglo-American sphere. Especially in developing economies, where markets are thin and...

Because corruption must be hidden from the public and is not enforced by courts it entails transaction costs, which are larger than those from legal exchange. This suggests that corrupt contracts are primarily relational contracts where legal exchange serves as a basis for sealing and enforcing...

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom in European economic history that long-distance maritime transport was always more cost-effective than overland trade routes. Thus the majority of historians in the past century have attributed the rapid decline of the medieval Champagne Fairs,...