Some studies in the literature exert strong criticism with regards to the Structural Policy of the European Union. This study reviews the past Structural Policy and pays special attention to the proposals for the next budgetary period 2007-2013 as laid down in the Dutch IBO-report (2001)....

This paper provides a survey of the economic literature on immigration. We first give an impression of immigration in the Netherlands in 1500-1960, followed by a discussion of the long term economic consequences of the mass migration preceding Word War I. We then discuss some literature which...

In an earlier study of ours, we provided evidence of consumer price level convergence in Europe, particularly in the 1960s and the 1990s (Faber and Stokman, 2004). The analysis was based on transformations of country HICP indices into absolute price levels, by combining time series HICP data...

Over the last two decades, communication has become an increasingly importantaspect of monetary policy. These real-world developments have spawned a huge newscholarly literature on central bank communicationmostly empirical, and almost all of it written in this decade. We survey this...

This paper analyses the impact of loan market competition on the interest rates applied by euro area banks to loans and deposits during the 1994-2004 period, using a novel measure of competition called the Boone indicator. We find evidence that stronger competition implies significantly lower...

Familiarity with working in a specific institutional environment compared to its competitors can provide a firm with a competitive advantage, making it invest in specific host countries. We examine whether this notion of institutional competitive advantage drives banks to seek out specific...

A disadvantage of EMU is the lack of national monetary policy to absorb country-specific shocks. The seriousness of this depends on the availability of alternative adjustment mechanisms, as well as on the asymmetry of the demand and supply shocks within EMU. The aim of this paper is to analyse...

We analyse the possible impact of EMU enlargement on inflation rates in the ac-cession countries. We establish two main points: first, using a theoretical model we show that if large initial differences in price levels occur, even under very favourable circumstances the optimal path for price...

We analyse the optimal composition of a federal or supra-national committee. The representation of regional (national) entities in federal committees is typically motivated by their superior knowledge of local conditions. Using this argument, we formally model the optimal composition of a...

A disadvantage of EMU is the lack of national monetary policy to absorb country-specific shocks. The seriousness of this depends on the availability of alternative adjustment mechanisms, as well as on the asymmetry of the demand and supply shocks within EMU. Previous empirical research on the...