All advanced industrialized societies face the problem of air pollution produced by motor vehicles. In spite of striking improvements in internal combustion engine technology, air pollution in most urban areas is still measured at levels determined to be harmful to human health. Throughout the...

This paper studies the relevance of strategic trade effects in the environmental policy for the European electricity sector. The production, investment and trade of electricity are modelled for four European countries. Three market regimes are distinguished: perfect competition, price regulation...

France has a very ambitious environmental-policy agenda, aimed chiefly at cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but also at dealing with local air and water pollution, waste management and the conservation of biodiversity. The laws that followed the Grenelle de l'environnement encompass policy...

This paper offers a quantitative description of European private equity markets and compares the recent development in these markets with the development of the US venture capital market. Moreover, the paper addresses the differences between private equity investors acting in a single national...

In this paper we assess the current relevance of Ricardian theory. Relative prices, labor costs, and productivity are evaluated as determinants of a country's international competitiveness at the industry level. Working with detailed data on unit values and with industry data on productivity, we...

We develop a human capital model with borrowing constraints explicitly derived from government student loan programs and private lending under limited commitment. Two key implications of our analysis are: (i) binding constraints may not depress investment; and (ii) a positive relationship...

Increasingly, grade retention is viewed as an important alternative to social promotion, yet evidence to date is unable to disentangle how the effect of grade retention varies by abilities and over time. The key challenge is differential selection of students into retention across grades and by...

This paper makes three contributions to the literature on educational attainment gaps by family income. First, we conduct a parallel empirical analysis of the effects of parental income on post-secondary (PS) attendance for recent high school cohorts in both the U.S. and Canada using data from...

Because a significant portion of U.S. students lacks critical mathematic skills, schools across the country are investing heavily in computerized curriculums as a way to enhance education output, even though there is surprisingly little evidence that they actually improve student achievement. In...