The analysis of motorway renewal costs presented in this paper was driven by two research questions: First, to analyse the economic process of motorway renewal work and to identify whether there exist economies of scale; and second to identify the influence of traffic volume on renewal costs and to derive an estimate of marginal infrastructure costs as part of optimal road user charges. The analysis ...
Reliable information on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is rare and costly for financial intermediaries. Therefore relationship banking is often considered as the appropriate lending technique. In this paper we offer a theoretical model to analyze relationship banking and the pricing behavior of banks in a Bertrand competition framework with monitoring costs. We show that the lack of reliable ...
This paper proposes a simultaneous-equation approach to the estimation of the contribution of transport infrastructure accumulation to regional growth. We model explicitly the political-economy process driving infrastructure investments; in doing so, we eliminate a potential source of bias in production-function estimates and generate testable hypotheses on the forces that shape infrastructure policy. ...
The decline in output volatility in Germany is analysed. A lower level of variance in an autoregressive model of output growth can be either due to a change in the structure of the economy (a change in the propagation mechanism) or a reduced error term variance (reduced impulses). In Germany the decline output volatility is due to a decline in the persistence of the growth process. This is in contrast ...
Recent empirical analyses of the relationship between financial system development and economic growth find that financial system development causes economic growth, is a good predictor of growth and that its impact is relatively large. Moreover, the empirical literature predicts that the adverse effects of banking crises on economic growth will rise in the absence of an adequate response by the government. ...
There is little empirical evidence concerning the effects of intellectual property rights (IPR) in technologically advanced developing countries. Complete enumeration of the Mexican maize breeding industry showed that, contrary to the hypothesis that IPR would support innovation, IPR play no role in the industry. IPR theory should be revised to include characteristics of developing countries critical ...
