Firms grant to their employees non-tradable stock options as an incentive device. Is the opportunity cost of issuing these options equal to the amount the company would receive if it sold the same options to outside investors? No, it is not, since the options granted to employees are non...

We argue that economics - as the scientific method of analyzing trade-offs - can be helpful (and may even be indispensable) for assessing the trade-off between intergenerational and intragenerational justice. Economic analysis can delineate the opportunity set of politics with respect to the two...

Given the production technology of a multiproduct firm, economists usually try to represent this technology by functions, namely the cost function, the revenue function and the input and output distance functions. In doing so the analysis directs the attention to the (dual)matching of quantities...

This paper contributes to the productivity literature by using results from firm-level productivity studies to improve forecasts of macro-level productivity growth. The paper employs current research methods on estimating firm-level productivity to build times-series components that capture the...

In this work, inspired by Winter (2006), in fact of vintage 1968, we discuss the relation between three different levels of analysis of technologies, namely as (i) bodies of problem-solving knowledge, (ii) organizational procedures, and (iii) input-output relations. We begin by arguing that the...

This paper proposes a general formulation of a nonparametric frontier model introducingexternal environmental factors that might influence the production process butare neither inputs nor outputs under the control of the producer. A representation isproposed in terms of a probabilistic model...

The social or economic discount rate is the threshold rate used to calculate the net present value of an investment project, a program, or a regulatory intervention to see whether the proposed expenditures are economically worthwhile to undertake. The size of the economic rate of discount has...

This study estimates the size and value of unpaid family caretaking activities at a European level. While at a country level several studies are available, a comprehensive evaluation for Europe as a whole was missing so far, mainly due to data limitations. This paper fills this gap using a...

Patterns of informal care are documented throughout the day with Dutch time use diary data. The diary data enable us to identify a, so far overlooked, source of opportunity costs of informal care, i.e. the necessity to perform particular tasks of informal care at specific moments of the day....

There is no robust empirical support for the effect of financial incentives on the decision to work in self-employment rather than as a wage earner. In the literature, this is seen as a puzzle. We offer a focus on the opportunity cost, i.e. the wages given up as an employee. Information on...