Digital products have the property that they can be copied almost costlessly. This makes them candidates for non-commercial copying by final consumers. Because the copy of a copy typically does not deteriorate in quality, copying products can become a wide-spread phenomenon - this can be...

The effects of (private, small-scale) piracy on the pricing behavior of producers of information goods are studied within a unified model of vertical differentiation. Although information goods are assumed to be perfectly horizontally differentiated, demands are interdependent because the...

The European population is living longer but retiring earlier. More and more individuals are spending an increasing fraction of their life-time relying on retirement benefits. At the same time, social security programs face mounting financial difficulties. The purpose of this paper is to explain...

Most macroeconomic models treat the central bank and the treasury as a unified entity. The balance sheet of the central bank is therefore implicitly treated as an accounting fiction. While this is often realistic, the central bank balance sheet today, with the US and ESCB balance sheets nearly...

What political objective should a common central bank in a heterogeneous monetary union pursue? Should it base its decisions on the EU-wide average of inflation and growth or should it instead focus on (appropriately weighted) national rates of inflation and growth? We find that a central bank...

This paper studies the design, effects and interactions of monetary and fiscal policies in the euro-area and between the euro-area and the non euro-area. To do so, a stylized three-country model of monetary and fiscal policy rules is constructed. It is analyzed how monetary and fiscal rules...

Should a subset of member states of a federation be allowed to form a sub-union on some policy issue? When centralization is not politically feasible, allowing an enhanced cooperation agreement among a subset of countries permits the latter to gain benefits which would otherwise be lost....

In 1999 the EU abolished duty-free on intra-EU travel, whilst other countries still retain duty-free shopping for international travellers. We adress several aspects of duty-free trade, including effects on consumption, revenue and price-setting. From a global perspective we identify the...

The paper derives a normative model for partial fiscal equalisation based on a number of axioms and allows for the existence of a specific fiscal need in the jurisdictions. The theoretical model is then empirically tested for the case of the European Union using data from 1986-97. It is found...