The proposal involves the establishment of ?welfare accounts? for every person in a country. There are to be four accounts: a retirement account (covering pensions), an unemployment account (covering unemployment support), a human capital account (covering education and training), and a health...

Governments may draft contracts with market agents for allocating subsidies and pursuing specific policy goals. Contract enforcement via binding commitments is difficult, however, when exogenous (environmental) and endogenous (behavioural) risks interact. Analyzing the old debt compromise in...

The European Unions's task of providing Trans-European Networks (TENs) in transportation, communications and energy transmission which has been enacted by the treaty of Maastricht, is not confined to internal networks in the EU. Since 1994 this task has been widened so as to give support to the...

The paper analyses the infrastructure provision in East Germany mainly by an examination of existing literature. At the time of German unification 1990, infrastructure in East Germany was in a very bad condition. After more than ten years of rebuilding, most of the remaining need for...

The issue of whether government capital is productive has received a great deal of recent attention. Yet, empirical analyses of public capital productivity have been limited to a small sample of countries for which official capital stock estimates are available. Building on a new database that...

In this paper we apply two statistical models to the measurement of polarization to Israeli income data over the past decade in order to empirically detect income classes as sub-populations of incomes concentrated around an optimal number of poles. The statistical models compared are a...

A general theoretical and empirical framework is developed for assessing the potential of a vertically integrated firm to foreclose downstream competitors. Using this framework a policymaker may also evaluate the empirical welfare effects from a vertically integrated firm raising rivals' costs....

A mandatory open-network-provision (ONP) by dominant firms is the appropriate government regulation in the presence of network externalities. For basic telephone services and online services, a permanent ONP regulation seems indispensable, whereas telecommunication networks only require...

NGOs could help scale up foreign aid efforts by mobilizing private donations. However, fundraising activities do not necessarily result in higher donations, and substitution effects between different sources of revenue may diminish the overall pool of NGOs’ resources. This paper examines the...

This paper examines the long-run effect of foreign aid on income inequality for 21 recipient countries using panel cointegration techniques to control for omitted variable and endogeneity bias. We find that aid exerts an inequality increasing effect on income distribution