Indicators of trust, confidence, optimism or sentiment among consumers and/or investors, are published continuously in the mass media. More importantly, these indices seem not only to reflect how the state of the real economy is perceived by private agents, but can also help predict the future...

Following the Euro changeover in January 2002, consumers across the Euro Area perceived a sharp rise in inflation, in contrast to official figures. Several theories have been advanced to explain this apparent economic illusion, but they struggle to account for its striking scale and persistence....

The outcome of the economic performance of individuals is utilised in the form of consumption and consequent welfare. Despite this truism, there is relatively little information available on household consumption behaviour in Hungary stemming from investigations based on economic theory. The...

We investigate the life cycle patterns of households’spending on medium value durables. We use panel data on expenditures on appliances and consumer electronics the British Household Panel Study between 1997 and 2008. In cross section, expenditures for appliances and consumer electronics...

Competition in public utility sectors has been encouraged in recent years throughout Europe. In this paper we try and analyse the welfare effects of these reforms in Italy, with particular attention to water and energy goods. The first step is to introduce a sensible measure of affordability of...

Tax Liability Side Equivalence (tax LSE) claims that the statutory incidence of a tax is irrelevant for its economic incidence. In gift-exchange labor markets, firms provide a gift to workers by paying high wages, and workers reciprocate by providing high efforts. Tax LSE is theoretically...

One of the main findings of a large body of gift exchange experiments is that in an incomplete contracts environment workers on average do not shirk and usually provide more than the minimum enforceable effort level. In general, 40 to 60 percent of the workers reward higher wages with higher...

Using a formal principal-agent model, I investigate the relation between monetary gift-exchange and incentive pay, while allowing for worker heterogeneity. I assume that some agents care more for their principal when they are convinced that the principal cares for them. Principals can signal...