Empirical economic analyses allow to feed these reasoning and models and validate or refute their predictions. In addition, the increase in the quantity and quality of economic data, together with the development of empirical methods that, for example, make it possible to advance in the identification of causal effects, means that applied economics exercises provide increasingly informative and reliable evidence for decision-making and assessment of policy interventions. In short, the contributions of the field of applied economics are today more important than ever due to the need to shed light on the real drivers and consequences of (socio)economic phenomena.

Firms must access financial markets to surpass financial barriers limiting innovation activities. However, an overreliance on debt might moderate creativity and innovativeness. From a sample of European manufacturing firms, and applying a system of equations using GSEM, we derive a function to determine the thresholds of the optimal acquisition of working capital and physical investment. Contrasting this information with the descriptive data, firms tend to under-finance working capital, as future short-term needs are more challenging to identify when designing investment plans. Additionally, we find evidence for the heterogeneous financial needs of firms operating in high-tech as compared to low-tech sectors, as well as other differences related to firm age.

This study is the first to present an explicit view of the structural determinants of oil production across the short-, medium-, and long-term. The analysis relies on a structural vector autoregressive model utilizing a purely agnostic and ICA-based identification approach. The results, obtained from impulse response functions, estimated oil supply and demand elasticities, the decomposition of forecast error variances, and the historical decomposition of oil production, all indicate that, over the past five decades, changes in crude oil demand have had only minor impacts on the actual level of oil production. Local projections of global CO2 emissions on annualized oil market shocks reveal that only supply and aggregate demand shocks have impacted on CO2 emissions, while oil-specific demand shocks did not exert any significant influence.

In this study, we introduce a family of rules for claims problems called the CEL-family. The family is defined by means of a parameter theta in [0,1] as a notion of solidarity and contribution. It contains the Constrained equal losses and the Constrained equal awards rules. We perform an axiomatic analysis considering the main properties in the literature, for the sake of comparison. We apply the family to the distribution of the European Regional Development Funds to study how the rules in the family treat regions with relatively smaller claims compared to regions with relatively larger claims.

While it's known that the layout of cities affects their resource use, the role of settlement and infrastructure patterns in determining national-level material use hasn't been explored due to a lack of data. This study systematically examines a wide range of drivers influencing national per-capita material demand, considering both production- and consumption-based indicators. Alongside traditional indicators like GDP, the analysis introduces eight new indicators representing the extent and patterns of settlements and transport infrastructure in each country. Covering 123 countries with 91% of the world's population and 92% of global GDP, the study reveals that built structures significantly influence resource use. Material stock pattern indicators provide substantial additional insights beyond GDP and other usual indicators. The area of built-up land per capita stands out as a particularly strong predictor, suggesting it deserves attention in sustainability strategies.