Economists routinely use survey measures of, for example, risk preferences, trust, political attitudes, or wellbeing. The literature generally treats numerical response categories as if they represent equal psychological intervals. We provide the first systematic test of this assumption,...

Bank market power has far-reaching effects as, among other things, it affects the price of credit. Even though it is well-known that banks are spatially interdependent due to rival banks having branches in the same geographical areas, the literature on bank market power overlooks this. To...

Government debt can potentially enhance high-quality economic development, yet its effects and risks diverge substantially under the interplay of scale economies and diseconomies. Against the backdrop of the 20th CPC Central Committee's Third Plenary Session, which emphasized coordinated...

We estimate measures of economies of scale and scope for a sample of 48 Canadian universities that produce multiple outputs. Estimates have not been previously attempted for Canadian universities to our knowledge. Declining financial support from provincial governments makes finding cost...

This paper characterizes the short- and long-run Cournot equilibrium with heterogeneous firms and stochastic technological change. In our model, firms have different technologies with heterogeneous fixed and variable costs and various degrees of markups. In a framework with homogeneous firms,...

This paper investigates how Artificial Intelligence (AI) goes beyond traditional technological roles to drive transformation across industries, organisations, and society. By analysing 2188 academic papers from the arXiv platform (from 2018 until 2025), the study highlights the unexpectedly...

This paper revisits the n-player rent-seeking contest with homogeneous valuations and increasing returns. Our main result says that, for any m ∈ {2, . . . , n − 1}, there are threshold values 1 R∗(m) R∗ (m) ≤ 2 for the Tullock parameter R such that a pure strategy equilibrium with m...

The bio-based industry sector is a vital part of the bioeconomy. It can deliver sustainable alternatives to fossil-based products, fostering industrial competitiveness and sustainable economic growth for the EU. The EU's bio-based industry has strong fundamentals but faces challenges when it...

We revisit the size-volatility relationship in firm growth using administrative data on French manufacturing firms. Departing from the log-log linear decay commonly reported by other studies, we find a two-regime pattern: volatility declines steeply with size for small firms, but flattens for...

A key challenge facing developing countries is how to promote export performance through trade liberalization (TL). Using large and highly disaggregate firm-level data with 6-digit HS categories for 1995-2019, we investigate the issue for China based on the recent literature of export margins...

The Philippine government's long-term vision, AmBisyon Natin 2040, aims for a prosperous, predominantly middle-class society where no one is poor. The Philippine Development Plan 2023- 2028 emphasizes strategies to develop and protect individual and family capabilities by reducing...

Historically, agricultural credit programs have been used as a policy instrument to improve agricultural productivity and livelihoods of smallholder farmers. The effectiveness of such credit programs has been widely deliberated with an opaque unanimity being reached since yield is stochastic....

China makes extensive use of subsidies in order to take a leading role on the global markets in the green technology sectors of electric vehicles, wind turbines and railway rolling stock. According to DiPippo et al. (2022) and recent OECD studies, the industrial subsidies in China are at least...