Abstract We provide an explanation for why centralisation of political decision making results in overspending in some policy domains, whereas too low spending persists in others. We study a model in which delegates from jurisdictions bargain over local public goods provision. If all of the...

This paper estimates a model of female time allocation and non-durable consumption in an intertemporal utility maximization framework. We are using rather extensive but relatively unexploited series of repeated cross sections from the Dutch B.O. consumer expenditure survey from Statistics...

We investigate the effects of M&A on innovation in the specific context of potential or realized market dominance. Authorities are challenged by balancing both detrimental and beneficial effects of mergers on innovation, especially when a merger threatens to result in market dominance, while...

The issue of What the EU Should Do, or what should be the competences of the European Union, is gaining more relevance with the increasing level of EU integration. The academic analysis on the competences of the EU has so far not fully answered this question. The political science literature has...

If voters care for the relative supply of public goods compared to otherjurisdictions, decentralized provision of public goods will be too high.Potentially, centralization internalizes the negative externalities fromthe production of these `conspicuous' public goods. However, in amodel of...

Abstract This paper analyzes the effects of legislative bargaining in the EU on public goods provision and lobbying. We argue that delegation to a single policy maker at the centralized level -which we call supranational policy making- increases lobbying expenditures. When policy in the center...

Abstract In this paper, we estimate fundamental bilateral real exchange rates for a group of eight accession countries using a panel-cointegration approach for the period 1993-2003. We document a significant positive link between productivity levels and the corresponding real exchange rate...

Uncovered interest rate parity provides a crucial theoretical underpinning for many models in international finance and international monetary economics. Though theoretically sound, this concept has not been supported by the empirical evidence. Typically, econometric tests not only reject the...

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it exhibits that standard tools in the measurement of income inequality, such as the Lorenz curve and the Gini-index, can successfully be applied to the issues of inequality measurement of carbon emissions and the equity of abatement policies across...

Mergers are the mechanisms that redraw the boundaries of the firm. In this paper, we relate incomplete contracts, upon which much of our understanding of firm boundaries is based, to empirical regularities in the market for mergers and acquisitions. We begin by empirically challenging...