The budget of a university essentially depends on the number of students it enrols. In multi-department universities resources created in one department may be redistributed to other departments. This redistribution affects the way academics share their working time between research and teaching...

In this paper, we raise the following two questions: (1) do Belgian holding companies operate an internal capital market to transfer financial resources in between their subsidiaries? And if yes, (2) is the internal capital market efficient? To answer the first question, we check if the group...

This note points out the differences between conducting several projects within one big firm (common ownership) and conducting each project within an independent firm (separate ownership).

Social status, or prestige, is an important motive for buying art or collectibles and for participation in charity auctions. We study a symmetric private value auction with prestige motives, in which the auction outcome is used by an outside observer to infer the bidders’ types. We elicit...

Markets are incomplete when the assets available to the agents do not span the space of future contingencies. Efficiency is then assessed by the weak criterion of "constrained efficiency" (efficiency relative to the set of allocations compatible with the asset structure). That criterion requires...

We investigate whether the plurality rule aggregates information efficiently in large elections with multiple alternatives, in which voters have common interests. Voters’ preferences depend on an unknown state of nature, and they receive imprecise private signals about the state of nature...

Global income taxation in the country of residence is a legal dogma of international taxation. We question this dogma from the perspective of relations with developing countries from a legal and economic perspective, and make a modern and fair proposal for tax treaties. We will show under which...

In this paper, we discuss the choice for build-operate-and-transfer (BOT) concessions when governments and firm managers do not share the same information regarding the operation characteristics of a facility. We show that larger shadow costs of public funds and larger information asymmetries...

In this paper, we consider a population of individuals who differ in two dimensions: their risk type (expected loss) and their risk aversion. We solve for the profit maximizing menu of contracts that a monopolistic insurer puts out on the market. First, we find that it is never optimal to fully...

This paper identifies the optimal two-period price sequence in the attempt for selling a good, with take-it-or-leave-it offers, when the seller faces ambiguity about the buyers' willingness to pay. If the first round fails, the seller updates its beliefs on the state of the market in accordance...