Knowledge drives the growth of nations and regions in a competitive space-economy. Hence, we would expect a strong correlation between investments in R&D, knowledge and learning processes, on the one hand, and productivity increases, on the other. However, the empirical evidence shows consistent...

The consequences of granting democratic rights to citizens in otherwise authoritarian regimes has been extensively studied. Much less is know about the implications of retracting these rights when a government wants to recentralize power. Autonomous governance in rural China, introduced in the...

In this paper, I develop an overlapping generations model to analyze the effects of property transfer taxes on homeownership, residential mobility, and welfare in the Netherlands. A revenue-neutral abolition of the 2% transfer tax increases the likelihood that homeowners sell their old house and...

Many economic and social situations can be represented by a digraph. Both axiomatic and iterativemethods to determine the strength or power of all the nodes in a digraph have been proposed inthe literature. We propose a new method, where the power of a node is determined by both thenumber of its...

In this paper we describe the extreme points of two closely related polytopes that are assigned to a digraph. The first polytope is the set of all sharing vectors (elements from the unit simplex) such that each node gets at least as much as each of its successors. The second one is the set of...

In this paper, we consider deterministic (both fluid and discrete) polling systems with N queues with infinite buffers and we show how to compute the best polling sequence (minimizing the average total workload). With two queues, the best polling sequence is always periodic when the system is...

The use of various moving average (MA) rules remains popular with financial market practitioners. These rules have recently become the focus of a number empirical studies, but there have been very few studies of financial market models where some agents employ technical trading rules of the type...

We consider cooperative games with transferable utility (TU-games), in which we allow for a social structure on the set of players. The social structure is utilized to refine the core of the game. For every coalition the relative strength of a player within that coalition is induced by the...

The first three factors resulting from a principal components analysis of term structure data are in the literature typically interpreted as driving the level, slope and curvature of the term structure. Using slight generalisations of theorems from total positivity, we present sufficient...

A version of the classical secretary problem is studied, in which one is interested in selecting one of the b best out of a group of n differently ranked persons who are presented one by one in a random order. It is assumed that b is bigger than or equal to 1 is a preassigned number. It is...