In its first steps toward reform of its huge and hugely important railway system, the Russian Federation has begun corporate restructuring of a kind favored by many students of railway reform throughout the world: some kind of separation of the entity controlling the infrastructure from the...

Public opinion surveys conducted since 1977 in Japan are usually interpreted as showing decreasing support among the Japanese population for Official Development Assistance (ODA), and possibly, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cabinet Office of Japan have justified recent cuts in ODA...

Software is a potentially excludable public good. It is possible, at some cost, to exclude non-paying users from its consumption by using copyright law or technological restraints. Licensing the software under proprietary license terms makes of it a private good, licensing it under the BSD does...

A fundamental aspect of any open payment system is the interchange fee that is paid from the merchant's bank to the cardholder's bank. Using a model in which there is partial participation by heterogeneous consumers and merchants, this paper characterizes the output maximizing, profit maximizing...

This paper analyses oligopolies using the Cournot/Stackelberg framework, but allowing some firms to be pursueing aims other than profit maximisation. The existence of even a single output maximising firm can have dramatic effects on outputs, prices and welfare, even if such a firms faces...

This papers sheds light on the puzzling evidence that even though open source software (OSS) is a public good, it is developed for free by highly qualified, young and motivated individuals, and evolves at a rapid pace. We show that once OSS development is understood as the private provision of a...

This paper analyses market competition between two different types of credit card platforms: not-for-profit associations and proprietary systems. The main focus is on the role of the interchange fee set by not-for-profit platforms. We show that when the interchange fee is set so as to maximise...

This paper explores potential channels through which information technology (IT) affects economic development. The channel emphasized here is the reduction of transaction costs through the use of information technology. We discuss the nature of transaction costs, their possible impacts on...

The study aims to examine the robustness of different PPP models by applying different types of econometric techniques in ASEAN-Five economies from 1983:M1 to 2002:M9. Two versions of PPP theory have been estimated within Engle-Granger bivariate cointegration test, Johansen- Juselius...

The paper develops a theoretical model showing a mutual relationship between corruption and capital account restrictions. According to the model, higher corruption induces stricter restrictions and vice versa. We test the model using panel data for 112 countries over the period 1984-2002 and...