The endogenous approach to regional development policy has become central over the last decade. By employing the conditional frontier approach, this paper investigates the relative contribution to labour productivity growth of: (1) capital accumulation, (2) exogenous technical change and...

It is hardly surprising that companies try to exploit their intellectual property rights (IPRs) globally. This has generated hated disputes on the advantages and disadvantages associated to a global regime of IPRs. The aim of this chapter is to put the debate in the right context of what IP can...

This paper investigates the relationship between regional autonomy and the quality of governments in 171 European regions. We employ a novel dose-response approach that allows us to identify the distribution of the effect of decentralization on quality of governments. We find that the...

There is wide consensus that social capital increases government performance. However, the very mechanism underlying the relationship between social capital and well-performing governments remains unclear. In this paper we focus on the budgetary composition of local governments and find that the...

Building on the Kumar and Russell (2002) methodology, we propose a conditional frontier approach which allows singling out the role of technology gap in explaining labour productivity differences. We find convergence in labour productivity growth driven by capital accumulation and technical...