This paper proposes a behavioral model to study how schools influence students’ educational behavior and academic achievements. The school quality is then defined into two dimensions: the amount of market-valued skills schools impart and how well schools cultivate an educational identity....

It is puzzling that socioeconomic background greatly affects educational choice. Distinguished from the explanations based on expected utility theory, this paper attempts to explore the psychological mechanisms of generating educational identity1 and schooling choice. It offers a self-signaling...

The increased mobility of capital of the last few decades creates new challenges for the macroeconomic policies of the nation-states. In this paper we analyse some of these challenges. Contrary to what is often alleged, increased capital mobility does not necessarily increase the need for...

This paper aims at contributing to the literature on the differences in the transmission processes within Euroland. We start from the proposition that there are ‘deep’ differences in the nature of social conflicts and in the way countries deal with these conflicts. We empirically test this...

The financial crises of the 1990s have given a new impetus to proposals aimed at controlling international capital movements. Well-known economists came out in favour of such controls, giving (some of these) capital controls a new respectability. In this paper we want to evaluate these...

We provide evidence indicating that countries with well-developed social security systems do not necessarily face a trade-off between social spending and competitiveness. On average, countries that spend a lot on social needs score well in the competitiveness league. We investigate the...

Using a sample of about 160 countries over the last thirty years we test for the quantity theory relationship between money and inflation. When analysing the full sample of countries we find a strong positive relation between the long-run inflation and money growth rate. The relation is not,...

In this paper we compare the stabilizing properties of the EMU to those of a ERM system, controlled by Germany. We find that in general the EMU will provide better stabilization of inflation, output and the interest rate than the EMS system. However, these results only apply if the ECB can...

The aim of this paper is to find out whether the Balassa-Samuelson effect is important in EMU. We use panel data going from 1970 to 1995 for the current EU members in order to estimate the long run effect of bilateral differences in productivity growth differential between the traded and...