Where does the balance of power lie in a policy - making institution with an external agenda setter, legislators, and lobbies? In a multiple round majority rule game with sophisticated actors, we show that the agenda setter obtains its most preferred policy outcome even if all lobbies and...

The harmonized European value-added tax (VAT) is anything but a modern consumption tax that taxes all goods and services at a uniform rate. As exemplified by an analysis of the Dutch version, some 60% of the base is exempted, that is, not taxed on output but on inputs. This has serious...

The European higher education landscape has become increasingly integrated causing competition among universities that is no longer bound to national borders. In view of this development, the present paper investigates the relative efficiency of 450 European universities between 2011 and 2014....

We estimate a Ricardian model of Western European agricultural land values using farm-level data. We model the effect of temperature on land values using a flexible specification of daily mean temperature to test if there are temperature threshold effects. Results indicate that there are no...

The objective of this paper is to explain populist attitudes that are prevailing in a number of European democracies. Populist attitudes expectedly lead to social protests and populist votes. We capture the populist wave by relying not on voting behavior but rather on values that are...

This paper examines persistence, structural breaks and non-linearities in the case of five European stock market indices, namely the FTSE100 (UK), DAX30 (Germany), CAC40 (France), IBEX35 (Spain) and FTSE MIB40 (Italy), using fractional integration methods. The empirical results provide no...

This paper uses a modelling framework which includes two singularities (or poles) in the spectral density function, one corresponding to the long-run (zero) frequency and the other to the cyclical (non-zero) frequency. The adopted specification is very general, since it allows for fractional...