Over the past decade the scale of higher education in China has expanded substantially. Regional development policies attempted to make use of the scale expansion as a tool to reduce the inequality of higher education among different regions with different development levels through providing...

This paper establishes eight stylized facts on the evolution of the localization of economic activity across industries and regions in the EU-15 since 1980. Localization, which nests concentration and specialization, is measured by a Theil index. The stylized facts reveal a broad aggregate trend...

It is open to question whether the intensified worldwide competition for FDI has reduced its traditionally strong concentration in a few large and relatively advanced host countries. We calculate and decompose Theil indices to track changes in absolute and relative concentration of FDI during...

Night lights could be a valuable proxy of economic activity at the subnational level when GDP data are lacking or of poor quality. Supplementing Henderson et al.'s (2012) analysis at the national level, we assess the stability of the elasticity of GDP with regard to night lights across regions...

Die Globalisierung wirtschaftlicher Aktivitäten bei gleichzeitiger Fragmentierung und Dynamisierung der Markts verschärft den internationalen Kosten- und Innovationswettbewerb. Flexibilität und Innovationsfähigkeit sind zu entscheidenden Wettbewerbsfaktoren geworden. Viele Unternehmen haben...

Wirtschaftlicher Erfolg und moralische Akzeptanz der Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftsordnung spielen für deren Stabilität und evolutorische Effizienz eine zentrale Rolle. Der Sozialismus hat beides, Erfolg und Akzeptanz, nicht bewirken können. Demgegenüber hat die Marktwirtschaft unbestreitbar...

This paper investigates the role of personal relationships for doing business in the Greater Pearl River Delta, China. First, it discusses the interplay of formal and informal (relationship-based) institutions from the point of view of institutional economics, with a focus on economies with weak...

This paper describes the Chinese economic and institutional reform process as a gradual transition of an informal, relation-based governance system into a more formal and rule-based governance system. The consequences of macro-level institutional reforms on the importance of personal...

Hybrid governance structures between markets and hierarchies in many industries, e.g., in energy and telecommunications, challenge antitrust and regulation policy. The paper focuses on the theoretical and methodological basis provided by the New Institutional Economics (NIE) for analyzing the...