This volume, the result of the 21st Conference on Postal and Delivery Economics (Ireland, 2013), describes the continuing problem of the decline of the postal sector in the face of electronic competition and offers strategies for the survival of mail services in a digital age. The 25 original...

Exit strategies referred to specific industry characteristics have been widely studied in the economic literature (Harrigan, 1980; Ghemawat et al., 1985, 1990; Lieberman, 1990; Reynolds, 1988; Fundenberg et al., 1989; Baptista et al., 2006). These studies show that exit dynamics – by setting new boundaries...

Does affiliation with a business group enhance a firm's performance? What is the potential effect of this affiliation especially in declining economic periods? The literature provides contradictory results on this proposition. In this study, the authors explore the role of business group...

We analyze the rise and decline of the steel and mining industries in the regions of Saarland, Lorraine und Luxemburg over a long period, from the mid-19th century to 2003. Our main focus in on the period of structural decline in these industries after the second world war. Differences in the...

This paper provides experimental evidence on exit behavior of asymmetrically sized firms in a duopoly with declining demand. We conduct three treatments: (a) The basic model with indivisible real capital. The structure of this treatment represents the main findings of Ghemawat and Nalebuff...

In this keynote speech at the 2011 meeting of the Italian Association for Industrial Economics and Policy (SIEPI) in Rome, a basic framework to the study of competitiveness was presented together with the main findings of a recent publication on Sectoral Growth Drivers. Members of SIEPI worried...

This paper presents a simple North-South model of endogenous growth, based on learning by doing, which is consistent with the following empirical observations: (i) the price of investment goods relative to consumption goods has been falling for the last 40 years in most industrialized countries,...