This paper provides a theoretical analysis regarding the rationality of suicide attacks from an economist’s point of view. It is argued that although a terrorist gives up future utility from consumption by committing a suicide attack, this loss can be overcompensated by the utility he derives...

We use a two-country model with a central bank maximizing union-wide welfare and two fiscal authorities minimizing comparable, but slightly different country-wide losses. We analyze the rivalry between the three authorities in seven static games. Comparing a homogeneous with a heterogeneous...

We present an empirical implementation of a general-equilibrium model of international trade with heterogeneous manufacturing firms. The theory underlying our model is consistent with Melitz (2003). A nonlinear structural estimation procedure identifies a set of core parameters and unobserved...

Production often causes pollution as a by-product. Once environmental degra- dation becomes too severe, regulation is introduced by which society forces the economy to make a transition to cleaner production processes. We model this transition as a change in "general purpose technology" and...

We study the optimal control of a pollutant that accumulates with a delay.We find that optimal paths are, in general, non-monotonic and oscillatory, but monotonic if the objective function is additively separable. Hence, using additively separable objective functions as an approximation to a...

Individual terrorist are frequently behaving seemingly absurd, e.g. by carrying out suicide operations, while activities of the terrorist organisations as a whole often seem to be conducted in a very effective way. These facts caused many researchers to regard the leaders representing the...

The paper aims at extending the debate on Environmental Kuznets Curves to the case of non-renewable resources and to discuss the driving forces that might give rise to EKC's in this case. The paper at hand deviates from the standard EKC analysis in two ways: First, mostly EKC's are analyzed for...

A general growth model with explicit resource reallocation costs is set up. A new feature is the property of hysteresis (i.e. a continuum of stationary equilibria) in closed-economy growth models. Employing a linear model the hysteresis range and the consequences for the long-run growth rate are...

In this paper, we argue for a regulatory framework under which a bank’s required level of equity capital depends on the equity capital of its peers. Such bankingon- the-average rules are transparent and could also be combined with the current regulatory framework. In addition, we argue that...

In this paper, we explore the benefits from a supply-side oriented fiscal tax policy within the framework of a New Keynesian DSGE model. We show that countercyclical tax rules, which are contingent on the observed welfare gap or alternatively on the markup shock and levied on value added, reduce...