Günter Verheugen said: “Europe is good for SME’s and SME’s are good for Europe” and this is the main reason for writing this paper. Small and medium enterprises are the backbone of the European economy, and the best potential source of jobs and growth. The paper presents how SME’s are...

Development economists have argued that interesting dynamics exist in the intergroup movement of countries in terms of several development parameters. However, standard mobility measures are aggregative in nature. They do not study intergroup variation in mobility. In an earlier paper, we have...

Challenges arising from the EU policy focus on rural development lead to an increased demand for farm structure analyses at a regional level. The study’s aim is to show (1) which way structural change differs across EU15 regions referring to size and production orientation and (2) how far...

This thesis is a collection of three essays with contributions to the intergenerational and intra-generational mobility literature. The essay on full risk insurance and measurement error examines the likelihood that measurement error may reconcile observed departures from perfect rank immobility...

Credit migration or transition matrices, which characterize the expected changes in credit quality of obligors, are cardinal inputs to applications such as asset pricing and risk management. We propose a new metric for comparing these matrices (a mobility index) by first subtracting the identity...

This paper aims to measure the degree of income mobility in Brazil in the 1987-2005 period. To achieve that, we consider the axiomatic mobility approach and the dynamic tool suggested by Aebi et al. (1999). The transition probability matrix calculations and the mobility index indicate that...

L'étude utilise les données provenant de 14 des vagues de l'Enquête sociale générale (ESG), réalisée par Statistique Canada auprès des ménages canadiens. Les enquêtes retenues contiennent pour des années de 1986 à 2011 des informations sur le plus haut niveau d'éducation des...

This paper proposes to measure the mobility of a stochastic process as the expected value of a "mobility functional" with respect to its stationary distribution. The mobility functional thereby measures the valuation of movements between states. We not only highlight the conceptual advantages of...

The study is based on 14 waves of Statistics Canada's General Social Survey. The selected surveys conducted between 1986 and 2011 have information on the highest education level of respondents and their parents (father, mother). The analysis estimate the probability that a respondent, from many...