Study on the desirability of EC level legislation in the area of software patents. It is based on a comparative analysis of the present state of the law, and the advantages and disadvantages appearing from current practice in the EC Member States, the United States and Japan. While its principal...

This study has been carried out at the request of the EGE for the preparation of Opinion n°16 "Ethical aspects of patenting inventions involving human stem cell" , 12 January 2002

This paper analyzes cooperation between sovereign national authorities in the supervision and regulation of a multinational bank. We take a political economy approach to regulation and assume that supervisors maximize the welfare of their own country. The communication between the supervisors is...

We live in a service economy, but the extent of development of service employment differs across developed countries. This paper assesses the role of structural factors and institutions in explaining the common patterns and main differences in the recent expansion of service employment in OECD...

In a payment card association such as Visa, each time a consumer pays by card, the bank of the merchant (acquirer) pays an interchange fee (IF) to the bank of the cardholder (issuer) to carry out the transaction. This paper studies the determinants of socially and privately optimal IFs in a card...

The paper presents an analysis of the trade-offs of participants of different type between payment delay and liquidity requirement on the basis of synthetically generated data. The generation of the synthetic transaction data set for a simple RTGS system is described and calibrated using real...