Raising the bar (24)

This editorial summarizes the papers in issue 18(2) (2023). The first paper extends the Solow–Swan growth model with spatial dependence, pollution and time delay. The second paper investigates the (mis)match between relative factor costs and the output elasticities of production factors due to innovations in the European Union’s Smart Specialisation Strategy (S3). The third paper studies whether and in what way price regulation of gasoline affects competition and collusion between gasoline stations. The fourth paper provides empirical evidence that public library programmes encourage labour force participation in underdeveloped regions. The fifth paper proposes a general nesting spatial stochastic frontier model and a maximum likelihood estimation procedure to determine inefficiencies across units of observations. The sixth paper proposes a dynamic spatial autoregressive model in which the overall spatial weight matrix is composed of a convex combination of multiple underlying spatial weight matrices and the coefficients of all regressors are heterogeneous.