State and local debt and the debt of quasi-public agencies have grown in importance as a result of fiscal decentralization, rapid urbanization, and the increasing role played by private capital. However, with debt comes the risk of insolvency. This note outlines a set of aligned fiscal...

This Economic Premise examines the intersection of four important development themes: urbanization, agglomeration, gender, and informality. Although urbanization has continued at a rapid pace, formalization appears to have stalled. Women comprise an increasing share of the informal sector in...

The socio-economic benefits produced by the university and released into the economic system through higher education, research and technology transfer activities have long been recognized as fundamental inputs for industry innovation. More recently, the focus has progressively shifted to the...

In this paper we point out that the theoretical predictions concerning Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) are not fully confirmed by empirical evidence in Italy, a strict EPL country according to OECD. In particular, worker flows computed from both social security dataset and LFS are...

This paper examines the influence of environmental factors on technical, cost, scale and revenue efficiency of German savings banks in 2001‐2005. Taking into account growing regional disparities in economic wealth and population size, it differentiates between declining and growing regions....

This paper analyses convergence across the 88 subregions in Finland from 1934 to 1993. The results indicate a rather strong a convergence and intra-distribution dynamics of income levels. This indicates that, although the dispersion in subregional income levels has diminished, some ofthe poorer...

It is well-known that there are no pure strategy Nash equilibria (PSNE) in the standard three-candidate spatial voting model when candidates maximize their share of the vote. When all that matters to the candidates is winning the election, however, we show that PSNE do exist. We provide a...

We model the evolution of infrastructure networks as a preferential attachment process. We assume that geographical distance and country borders provide barriers to link formation in infrastructure networks. The model is validated against empirical data on the European Internet infrastructure...

The 'core-periphery model' is vitiated by its assumption of static expectations. That is, migration (inter-regional or intersectoral) is the key to agglomeration, but migrants base their decision on current wage differences alone--even though migration predictably alters wages and workers are...

This paper considers a model of oligopolistic competition and locational choice that incorporates the notion of regional industrial systems. Firms play a non cooperative game where the strategy set of firms is given by a set of existing industrial districts. Each firm is distinguished by its...