The majority of microfinance impact studies focus on finding their effect on a specific group of beneficiaries, in contrast we aim to identify the impact on whole economies (economic growth, and financial sector development and reductions in income inequalities), which is an important policy...

In France, firms with 50 employees or more face substantially more regulation than firms with less than 50. As a result, the size distribution of firms is visibly distorted: there are many firms with exactly 49 employees. We model the regulation as the combination of a sunk cost that must be...

Achieving structural transformation is believed to be a priority agenda in development policy of developing countries. However, the discussion of structural transformation has been bound to an analysis of labor shifts and productivity convergence between economic sectors. This narrow definition...

This book stems from work by the author published in Energy Economics, the International Journal of Exergy and follow-up working papers and a previous book Thermoeconomics. Topics covered include entropy processes in the world, a history of human development, the distribution of income, first...

This third edition of the book stems from work by the author published in Energy Economics, the International Journal of Exergy and follow-up working papers. Topics covered include the gas laws, the distribution of income, first and second laws of thermodynamics, economic processes, elasticity,...

The paper investigates the relationship between credit union (CU) financial intermediation and economic growth using seventeen-year data (1995-2011) from 12 CU countries. Using the panel Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimation technique, the study finds that there is a statistically...

Hansen and Lønstrup [Journal of Population Economics, 2012] construct a three-period, life-cycle model to study the famed Ben-Porath mechanism and attempt to reconcile it with the empirical findings in Hazan [Econometrica, 2009]:increased life expectancy has a positive effect on schooling but a...

This paper reexamines a 1999 study by Abrams, Clarke, and Settle (ACS) which finds that, for the 1950-80 period, state-level economic growth is positively and significantly related to financial depth but is not influenced by banking restrictions and fiscal policy variables. The study focuses on...

The main purpose of this paper is to underline the downfalls of neoclassical growth theory. The narrow and artificial framework given by the neoclassical economists have no correspondent in real life. With a 'refreshed breath' the Austrian School of Economics tried to explain the dynamic and...

While quantifying the foreign ownership premium has received a lot of attention in the empirical literature, there is only little known about productivity variations between foreign affiliates of multinational firms. In order to enhance the understanding of the economic causes of this...