About
43
Publications
11,025
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
290
Citations
Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Current institution
Additional affiliations
September 2006 - present
September 2004 - September 2007
September 2004 - September 2006
Publications
Publications (43)
There is no summary indicator of firm concentration, but a multitude of ad hoc indicators that provide different and even contradictory results on the empirical distributions of firms. In this paper, I propose a definition of firm concentration and an Euclidean summary indicator of it. This indicator is then applied to a comprehensive database on t...
This paper analyzes the relationship between public education spending, long-run growth and income inequality. We propose an endogenous growth model with occupational choice and an endogenous supply of teachers and education quality.
We show that endogenous school quality alters the shape of those relationships in a way that has new policy implicat...
Innovation is the human capacity to give an idea the power to change the course of events and to push back the frontiers of the possible. If innovation is nowadays praised in the West and even beyond, it has long had a negative connotation in a semantic field limited to politics and religion. It is with the Enlightenment and the faith in the progre...
The firm size distribution (FSD) is one of the most well-known economic empirical regularity in market economies. Its functional form, postulated in macroeconomic models with heterogeneous firms, can be approximated by a parametric distribution. However, the parametric approximations proposed in the literature have long been contested due to the la...
Innovation is the human capacity to give an idea the power to change the course of events and to push back the frontiers of the possible. If innovation is nowadays praised in the West and even beyond, it has long had a negative connotation in a semantic field limited to politics and religion. It is with the Enlightenment and the faith in the progre...
Creativity refers to capacity of human beings to generate new productions or services that have value at the individual or collective level. The economic and social development of humanity since the Neolithic Revolution testifies to the tremendous power of creativity to promote change. This article focuses on explanations and measures of the econom...
Current empirical evidence does not seem to confirm that an improvement in living conditions is the cause of the shift in the human mindset toward innovation and long-term risky investment. However, it may well be one of the conditions for greater tolerance of income inequality in exchange for a steady increase in average income.
Creativity refers to capacity of human beings to generate new productions or services that have value at the individual or collective level. The economic and social development of humanity since the Neolithic Revolution testifies to the tremendous power of creativity to promote change. This article focuses on explanations and measures of the econom...
Due to truncated datasets and flawed statistical methods, the firm size distribution (FSD) does not yet have its undisputed stylized fact. Using comprehensive data on Belgian private firms, this paper proposes to estimate and test a new parametric distribution, called Generalized Pareto with cutoff (GPwC), and compare it to the commonly used Pareto...
The residential real estate market in Wallonia, in Belgium and in many other developed countries has witnessed a dynamic development over the last 20 years. One of its consequences was the unprecedented rise in property prices during this period. The financial crisis, triggered by the reversal of property prices in the United States in the mid-2000...
There are high economic expectations regarding the emergence of Big Data: a promised golden age for both consumers and firms. Digital technology allows firms to provide digital services in exchange of personal data, from which they can fine-tune their supply to better match market demand. By extending Arrow (1962)'s analysis of the market for infor...
This paper proposes an empirical analysis of the role of memory in determining the size of credits granted by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) during 1991–2003. We first build an original database from information associated with the number and contract types granted by clients, after which we develop an empirical strateg...
Shift-share analysis is a decomposition technique widely used in regional studies to quantify an industry-mix effect and a competitive effect on the growth of regional employment (or any other relevant variable) relative to the national average. This technique has always been subject to criticism for its lack of theoretical basis. This paper presen...
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of economic integration when countries differ in their social security systems, more specifically in the degree of funding of their pensions, and in the flexibility in the retirement age. It then turns to the impact of ageing, namely the decline in fertility and the increase in longevity, on the we...
This paper analyzes and compares the macroeconomic performance of defined-benefit and defined-contribution pay-as-you-go pension systems when population ages. When the fertility rate decreases or longevity rises, it is shown that a shift from defined benefit (defined total benefit or defined annuities) to defined contribu-tion always results in hig...
The reinforced Stability and Growth Pact entered into force in December 2011 with a new set of rules for economic and fiscal surveillance of the EU Member States. To strengthen the effective enforcement the SGP introduced the policy innovation of reverse qualified majority voting in the EU Council. Under reverse qualified majority voting the Europe...
This paper proposes an empirical analysis for asessing the extent to which multinational firms can effectively support market creation strategies. Our setting focuses on the transition countries, namely ex-socialist countries. Focusing on the lending policy of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), we build an original databas...
This paper proposes an empirical analysis associated with a case study. It focuses on the financing strategy adopted by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in the period 1991–2003. Our added value is an original exploration concerning the role of institutional memory. By exploiting information on the number and type of contracts by...
Recent empirical evidence shows that gross official capital transactions flow upstream in the international financial markets due to government policy objectives and that they account for the current account surpluses observed in the last decade in the fast-growing emerging economies. Following the Asian financial crisis, the governments of these c...
This paper focuses on the financing strategy adopted by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in the period 1991-2003. We propose a simple empirical method to isolate the most effective screening device for contracts granted under conditions of asymmetric information. In line with the predictions of the contract theory, the role of m...
The institutional purpose of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is to foster the transition towards open market-oriented economics. This paper investigates the lending policy of the bank (during the period 1991-2003) as a practical device to achieve the previous target. By building up an original database based on the publi...
Some emerging countries manipulate their exchange rates to promote an export-led growth policy and manage their current account. This has contributed to creating a "global saving glut" (Bernanke 2005) and increasing global current account imbalances since the end of the 1990s. This paper proposes a calibrated two-country overlapping generations mod...
Global imbalances are considered as one of the main culprits of the financial crisis which started in the United States in 2007. This paper aims to build a two- country deterministic growth framework with overlapping generations to investigate the macroeconomic effects of global imbalances that originate from forced saving in one country. This fram...
This paper aims at analysing the importance of local determinants to foreign direct investment (FDI) in three European regional case studies. The originality of the approach lies in the use of disaggregated data by sector and by region. The results are threefold. First, regional demand and productivity are fundamental FDI determinants, confirming m...
This paper examines the stationary state income level and income growth in an overlapping generations (OLG) model in which production uses three inputs: physical capital, human capital and land. The accumulation of human capital relies on parental funding of education and the past aggregate human capital stock. Four cases exhibiting various possibl...
This paper examines the conditions for endogenous growth in an overlapping generations (OLG) model with two sectors of production when the returns to scale may be non constant and provides the technological conditions for the highest in- come growth rate.
The objective of this paper is to identify the role of memory in repeated contracts with moral hazard in financial intermediation. We use the database we have built containing the contracts signed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development EBRD between 1991 and 2003. Our framework is a standard setting of repeated moral hazard. After h...
This study aims at analysing the determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows for a group of European regions. The originality of this approach lies in the use of disaggregated data by sector at regional level. First, we develop a qualitative description of our database and discuss the importance of the determinants in attracting FDI. Th...
The present paper aims at analyzing the sources of productivity in Europe to account for its recent underperformance and identify potential geographic idiosyncracies. We study the productivity performance and its sources in a sample of ten European regions belonging to four countries (France, Germany, Italy and Spain). Exploiting the increasing ava...
Resum ♦ This paper proposes a descriptive analysis of the distribution of multinational firms (MNE) in Catalunya by districts (comarques). Our purpose is to discuss the MNEs' location choice in Catalunya following the line of interpretation suggested by the location theory. We exploit an original database by using data on the MNEs' location by sect...
During the nineties, Europe became a major recipient of FDIs but Italian regions have been largely excluded from this process. Was it due to their characteristics, or were Italian regions “doomed” by a negative country effect? In this paper we address this issue by estimating the determinants of multinational firms’ location choices in 52 EU region...
This paper examines the existence condition of a balanced growth path in an overlapping generations model in which production uses three inputs, physical capital, human capital and land, with increasing returns to scale. Human capital is the engine of economic growth. It is shown that, unlike standard economic geography models, increasing returns v...
This paper aims to account for varying economic performances and political stability under dictatorship. We argue that economic welfare and social order are the contemporary relevant factors of political regimesÕ stability. Societies with low natural level of social order tend to tolerate predatory behavior from dictators in exchange of a provision...
We study optimal saving when incomes are certain and risk bears on consumption. A key finding is that, with CARA utility and additive uncertain consumption, or CRRA utility and multiplicative consumption, risk-averse individuals do not form precautionary saving as in the standard theory of saving under uncertainty.
In a two- region model, we formalize KindlebergerÕs idea that wealth breeds first more wealth, and then decline : when one region leads, its inhabitants develop consumption habits incompatible with the necessary investment in knowledge to remain the leader. This gives the other region a window of opportunity to gain economic primacy. We learn from...
Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, and how it's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life Gabriele Tondl, Convergence After Divergence? Regional Growth in Europe Brookings Institution Center on Urban & Metropolitan Policy, Beyond Merger: A Competitive Vision for the Regional City of Louisville Eliahu Stern, Ilan Salomon,...
This paper provides empirical evidence on the determinants of firms’ R&D investment and innovation decisions by using an original sample of Spanish firms from all business sectors (industry and services). The sample is the result of a survey conducted in Spain in 2006-2007 and includes firm-level data on innovative and noninnovative firms. The main...
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) was established in 1991 to assist the countries of the Soviet Bloc in transforming their centrally planned economic systems into market economies. The objectives of this paper are twofold. First, we develop a theoretical model that characterizes the EBRD-client relationship and determine t...
This study analyses the importance of innovation in Catalonia in terms of public policies and the business standpoint. The sector is studied by using the classic SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats). So Catalonia is currently consolidating and applying the Research and Development system, where the utmost commitment and...
Using a new database based on a survey on innovation this paper aims at iden tifying the determinants of firms' R&D investment and innovation decisions. The descriptive statistics confirm the evidence that the percentage of firms investing in R&D is substantially lower than the percentage of firms innovating. The econometric analysis allows toident...
