The sector of Information and Communication Technologies is one of the key instruments for the development of an economy. The literature emphasizes its capacity for both increasing productivity and generating new sources of income and wealth (Jorgenson, 2001; Colecchia and Schereyer, 2002; among...

The objective of this paper is to estimate technical efficiency in retailing; and the influence of inventory investment, wage levels, and firm age on this efficiency. We use the output supermarket chains¿ sales volume, calculated isolating the retailer price effect on its sales revenue. This...

There is a recent tendency toward encouraging universities to merge. This policy is based on the idea that mergers create synergy gains that enhance universities’ prestige by increasing their international visibility. However, this process may reduce competition for both research funds and...

The provision of pensions for the old and public education for the young represent a large share of public budgets. In most Western countries, current Social Security systems are under a big financial stress. Several reforms have been proposed to solve this problem. This paper deals with the...

The literature on vouchers often concludes that a voucher-based system cannot be the outcome of a majority vote. This paper shows that it is possible to propose selective vouchers (of exogenous value) such that the majority of voters are in favour of selective vouchers. As long as the...

This paper extends Wirl and Dockner¿s (1995) model designed to analyze the long-term bilateral interdependence between a resource exporting cartel and a coalition of resource importing country governments. Firstly, depletion effects are introduced into the analysis of the intertemporal...

In Barrett's (1994) paper on transboundary pollution abatement is shown that if the signatories of an international environmental agreement act in a Stackelberg fashion, then, depending on parameter values, a self-enforcing IEA can have any number of signatories between two and the grand...

In this paper we model the case of an international non-renewable resource monopolist as a differential game between the monopolist and the governments of the importing countries, and we investigate whether a tariff on the resource importations can be advantageous for the importing countries. We...

The stationary sunspot equilibria of a simple OLG economy with heterogeneous agents areconsidered. These equilibria are known to be suboptimal. The focus of the paper is on the efficacy,based on welfare economic considerations and informational requirements, of government policy insuch an...

We consider allocation problems with indivisible goods when agents’ preferences are single-peaked. Two natural procedures (up methods and temporary satisfaction methods) are proposed to solve these problems. They are constructed by using priority methods on the cartesian product of agents and...