We provide evidence indicating that countries with well-developed social security systems do not necessarily face a trade-off between social spending and competitiveness. On average, countries that spend a lot on social needs score well in the competitiveness league. We investigate the...

Using a sample of about 160 countries over the last thirty years we test for the quantity theory relationship between money and inflation. When analysing the full sample of countries we find a strong positive relation between the long-run inflation and money growth rate. The relation is not,...

This paper looks at the potential effect of partial ownership on the generation and the transmission sector of electricity markets. Ideally, in liberalized electricity markets, transmission is separated from generation. The transmission sector is a natural monopoly operated by a regulated...

In transportation planning there can be long lead times to adapt capacity. This paper addresses two questions. First, in a one mode world (say rail or road), what is the optimal capacity choice when faced with uncertain demand, long lead times and congestion. Using a simple analytical model it...

We analyse questionnaire data from a representative sample of the Flemish working population. For 781 respondents we construct their perception of the actual and of the fair income distribution. We check whether the use of different inequality measures leads to different interpretations of these...

Social distinction or status is an important motivation of human behaviour. This paper provides a selective survey of recent advances in the economic analysis of the origins and consequences of social status. First, a selection of empirical research from a variety of scientific disciplines is...

Regulators in Belgium and the Netherlands use different mechanisms to mitigate generation market power. In Belgium, antitrust authorities oblige the incumbent to sell financial Virtual Power Plants, while in the Netherlands regulators have been discussing the use of physical Virtual Power...

In this paper, we estimate markup ratios using firm-level data according to the techniques developed by Hall (1986, 1988) and Domowitz et al. (1988) for the Dutch and Belgian manufacturing industry from 1992 to 1997, to determine whether competition policy affects the pricing behaviour of firms....

We propose to estimate strategic interaction effects between general practitioners (GPs) and different specialist types to evaluate the viability threat for specialists associated to the introduction of a mandatory referral scheme. That is, we show that the specialists’ loss of patientele when...