Although conceptual support for the relevance of social capital as an antecedent of innovation has received much theoretical attention over recent years, measurement and quantitative evidence are scarce, particularly in regional contexts. Available empirical research referring to different units...

In the European rural development policy special emphasis is placed on support of the agro-food industry which is regarded as an important economic development driver in rural areas. This paper analyses and compares the employment and population changes in Denmark and France in the period 1990 -...

An important issue facing policymakers is the degree to which fluctuations in economic activity affect employment in large and small businesses across sectors and regions. These issues are particularly relevant for developing countries, as they matter for the understanding of the labour market...

The relationship between geography and trade is a central topic in international economics. This paper investigates the potential existence of a continental bias in world trade flows on a sample of 182 countries over the period 1990-2006. Using traditional estimation techniques and recent...

This paper investigates the relationship between economic growth and religion, particularly whether growth leads to desecularization. The secularization hypothesis (which is the opposite to the desecularization hypothesis (Casanova 1994); Berger 1999) ) postulates that economic growth is...

20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall there is still a strong division between the economies and labour markets of eastern and western Germany. In the last few years, however, unemployment has been reduced especially in the East, even in times of economic crisis. Within eastern Germany a...

We analyze the effects of the expansions of the European Union on inequality over the period 1960-2005 using an approach based on individuals' lifecycle incomes. This allows us to estimate permanent incomes and consider the effect of both survival rates and different rates of economic growth....

Unemployment in Europe has reached 10% as this Abstract was prepared, and it is over 10% in the United States at the same time. How has the service economy been related to the current global recession? That is the focus of this paper. Much has been written about the impact of the structural...

Abstract: Previous examinations of the literature suggests that high-growth firms (HGFs) exist in all or most industries, are not overrepresented in high-tech, and if anything appear to be slightly overrepresented in services. In an updated overview, we find that more recent studies, employing...

This paper lies in the tradition of decomposition analysis of wage differentials based on the model set forth in Blinder (1973) and Oaxaca (1973), and aims to measure labour market discrimination against Roma in South East European countries (Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia and Kosovo). We...