Interest rate caps, also called usury ceilings, are a widely used policy tool to protect consumers from excessive charges by loan providers. However, they are often cited as a barrier for the advancement of financial inclusion, as they may reduce the incentives to provide loans to lower-income...

Using a large dataset of firm-bank and ownership information for 23 European countries over 2008-2015, we study the dynamics of bank relationships after corporate acquisitions and the effects of changing banks on firm performance. Foreign acquirers do not rely on internal capital markets but...

We test a new model where the entrepreneurial decision is described as a process of successive engagement levels, i.e., as an entrepreneurial ladder. Five levels are distinguished using nearly 12,000 observations from the 2004 “Flash Eurobarometer survey on Entrepreneurship” covering the 25...

We investigate which countries have the highest potential to achieve entrepreneurial progress. This progress is defined using an entrepreneurial ladder with five successive steps: “never thought about starting a business”, “thinking about starting a business”, “taking steps to start a...

Polluted rivers are harmful to human, animals and plants living along it. To reduce the harm, cleaning costs are generated. However, when the river passes through several different countries or regions, a relevant question is how should the costs be shared among the agents. Ni and Wang (2007)...

In Becker et al. (2013a,b), we proposed a theory to explain giving behaviour in dictator experiments by a combination of selfishness and a notion of justice. The theory was tested using dictator, social planner, and veil of ignorance experiments. Here we analyse gender differences in preferences...

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 paper argues that the introduction of a short-sale constraint in the Arrow-Radner frameworkinvalidates standard definitions of complete and incomplete markets. In this constrained set-up,two threshold values with familiar properties arise.The case of a zero short-sale bound set on some...

This review considers the role of environmental effects in transport investment appraisal, mainly from the perspective of cost-benefit analysis, the most widely adopted appraisal technique. Although the basic principles of CBA are straightforward, several complications are identified that may...

The effects of a policy measure often reach the consumer only after one or more intermediatesteps, for instance because the measure lowers the cost of an input for an industry producinga consumer good. This paper is concerned with the question how to measure such indirect effectscorrectly under...