Numerous renewable and small-scale distributed generation (DG) technologies have now progressed to the stage where their technical feasibility has been proven and full-sclae projects have been successfully implemented worldwide. This paper surveys the available DG technologies and models their...

This paper analyses which likely effects international co-operation on climate change, the emissions trading directive of the European Union currently introduced and the tradable emissions permit systems specified under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) will have on energy...

Elbert Dijkgraaf defended his PhD-thesis 'Regulating the Dutch Waste Market' at 5 november 2004. This thesis analyses whether the risen costs of waste collection and treatment can be diminished by changing policy instruments. The thesis shows that user fees are very effective in reducing the...

This article investigates the factors that have induced and shaped the process of industry evolution of banking in the United Kingdom and, in particular, the reorganization of the retail payments system. It will look at how the effects of technical progress within a changing regulatory framework...

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...

The primary purpose of this article is to investigate the relationship between bank capital and credit risk taking in emerging market economies. We also investigate the influence of several regulatory, institutional and legal features on the relationship between risk and capital. We apply a...

The UK experienced a major residential real estate boom-bust cycle from the mid-Eighties to the mid-Nineties, accompanied by unprecedented shifts in the owner occupancy rate of young households. Previous empirical analyses have pointed toward income changes and financial deregulation as the...

Bulgaria is a small South-eastern European country with a population of 8 million inhabitants in economic transition. During the bank crisis (1996-97) about 1/3 of all banks went bankrupt. On 5 July 1997, the Bulgarian government, jointly with IMF, introduced the Currency Board Arrangement,...

The thrust of current deposit insurance reform--risk-based insurance premiums and capital requirements--is an effort to price deposit insurance more fairly. Fairly pricing deposit insurance eliminates inequitable wealth transfers, but it does not lead to an efficient equilibrium. This paper...

In a finite-trader version of the Diamond-Dybvig (1983) model, the symmetric, ex-ante efficient allocation is implementable by a direct mechanism (i.e., each trader announces the type of his own ex-post preference) in which truthful revelation is the strictly dominant strategy for each trader....