Projects
Economic policy and firm growth - Micro-econometric studies at the firm level KU Leuven
In the last decades, both policy makers in industrialized countries and academic scholars have broadly acknowledged the importance of small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) as backbone of the economic system in addition to the dominating large firms leading world markets. Particularly small, young high-tech companies have been identified as major source for future growth opportunities and welfare. However, these companies are also known to ...
The impact of "degrowth" and market economies on welfare and sustainability: a historical exploration. University of Antwerp
Foreign competition and the reallocation of economic activity within and across firms: measuring the productivity gains and the impacts on workers KU Leuven
This thesis consists of three chapters on the influence of firms' market power on derived factor demand and the reallocation of productive resources.
In the first chapter, I investigate how imperfect competition impacts resource reallocation and how we tend to measure it. The covariance between firms’ productivity and market shares is commonly used to analyze how the allocation of resources evolves within an industry in the aftermath ...
Structural Determinants of Economic Performance in the Roman World University of Antwerp
Human Capital, Religiosity, and Economic Development: Evidence from 19th Century France KU Leuven
This research project aims to contribute to the existing literature on the role of cultural factors (such as education and religiosity) for long-term economic development, by answering two crucial questions for both researchers and policy makers: 1. Does mass education matter for economic development? In the existing studies, mass education is generally considered irrelevant for innovation and early industrialization. However, it has always ...
Economic inequality on the eve of the Late Medieval crisis. Two regions compared: Tuscany and Northern France (c.1295-c.1320) Ghent University
Since the Great Recession of 2007, research on the causes of economic inequality has been at the centre of both societal and academic debates, also among historians. Whereas most scholars have focused on contemporary and early modern societies, I propose to address this issue by using European rural society in the 14th century as a laboratory to study and explain the high pre-Black Death economic inequality suggested by previous studies. This ...
Economic and financial databases for state-of-the-art empirical research in finance, business and economics KU Leuven
Economics and business schools can only excel in quantitative empirical research when an excellent infrastructure and high quality databases are available to the researchers. The requested infrastructure consists of a set of novel top-level financial and economic databases, as well as a user-friendly upgraded state-of-the art platform to access these data. This implies a very significant expansion and upgrade of the databases currently ...
Structural Determinants of Economic Performance in the Roman World Ghent University
We bring together four flemish and nine international research teams to study Roman economic development: 1° Can economic growth/decline be attributed to the Roman institutional framework ? 2° Did economic development change this framework? (3) What part was played by ecology ? We combine data from archaeology and natural science with models from neo-institutional and development economics, in a comparative long-term perspective. ...