This paper investigates the timing of the impact of changes in checks and balances on macroeconomic efficiency in a panel of countries. Using Battese and Coelli’s one-stage approach, we find that increasing checks and balances results in greater efficiency. Furthermore, the impact of...

Extensive multilingualism is one of the most important and fundamental principles of the European Union (EU). However, a large number of languages (currently 23) hinders communication and imposes substantial financial and legal costs. On the other hand, the reduction of the number of languages...

The size of patent applications has doubled over the past two decades, resulting in a dramatic surge in the workload of patent offices all over the world and serious concerns over patent quality standards. The current paper investigates the sources of this inflation in claims and pages for EPO...

This article analyses the voting and abstention patterns in French departments in the 1992 referendum on the Maastricht treaty, in light of the potential impact of monetary union. We observe that departmental characteristics implying either greater benefits or lower costs from monetary union are...

The main goal of this paper is to warn practitioners of the danger of neglecting outliers in regression analysis, in particular, good leverage points (i.e. points lying close to the regression hyperplane but outlying in the x-dimension). While the types of outliers which do influence regression...

Comment densifier la ville qualitativement pour qu'elle tende à se développer durablement ?Le Bureau fédéral du Plan va jusqu'à annoncer une augmentation spectaculaire de la population bruxelloise. L'offre du logement tant public que privé est-elle à même de subvenir aux besoins...