In this paper it is argued that the slowness of the legislativesystem implies pre-commitment of legislation for at least the periodit takes to change a law. A simple model illustrates the benefit ofthis pre-commitment.

We analyze a client's choice of contract in auctions where Dutch law firms compete for routine cases. The distinguishing feature here is that lawyers may submit bids with any fee arrangement they prefer: an hourly rate, a fixed fee or a mixed fee, which is a time-capped fixed fee plus an hourly...

There is extensive literature on whether courts or legislators produce efficient rules, but which of them produces rules efficiently? The law is subject to uncertainty ex ante; uncertainty makes the outcomes of trials difficult to predict and deters parties from settling disputes out of court. In...

We include initial holdings in the jungle economy of Piccione and Rubinstein (Economic Journal, 2007) in which the unique equilibrium satisfies lexicographic welfare maximization. When we relax assumptions on consumption sets and preferences slightly, equilibria other than lexicographic welfare...

This paper has a twofold objective. First, we develop a new method to assess the monetary valuefor individuals of external effects. The method makes use of an ordinal index of life satisfaction asscored by individual respondents who are subjected in varying intensity to the external effect....

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in <I>Transportation Research Part B: Methodological</I> (2011). Vol. 45(10), pages 1545-1559.<P> This paper analyses the cost of access travel time variability for air travelers. Reliable access to airports is important since it is likely that the cost of...</p></i>

In Europe, company cars are offered by employers as fringe benefits to their employees at a lower price than employees pay in the car market, mainly due to favourable taxation of company cars. We analyse the welfare effects of favourable taxation of company cars for the Netherlands. The...

This discussion paper led to a publication in <I>Empirical Economics</I> 2013, 45(3), 1189-1204.<P> We analyse the effects of distortionary company car taxation through increased household carownership for the Netherlands. We use several identification strategies and demonstrate thatfor about 20 percent...</p></i>

Although many researchers have investigated the value of open space in cities, few of them have compared them to the costs of providing this amenity. In this paper, we use the monocentric model of a city to derive a simple cost-benefit rule for the optimal provision of open space. The rule is...