We show that, with benevolent policymakers and fiscal leadership, monetary unification reduces inflation, taxes and public spending. These disciplining effects of a monetary union, which rise with the number of fiscal players in the union, are likely to raise welfare. Joining an optimally...

The judicious use of natural resources is a crucial prerequisite for sustainable growth not only in developed countries, but even more so in the Third World. To a substantial degree, natural resource use is determined by the tax structure governing a country''s economic activity. When a tax...

In this essay, I have tried to show that the European Union inititiatives towards science and technology, ostensibly in the interest of promoting employment and growth through technological advancement, have side effects that undermine the very purpose at which they aim. The funding formula and...

Combinatorial optimization problems arise in several areas ranging from management to mathematics and graph theory. Most combinatorial optimization problems are computationally hard due to the restriction that a subset of the variables have to take integral values. During the last two decades...

We consider networks evolving over time within an infinite-horizon dynamic setting. Transitions from one network to another are given by a stationary transition probability matrix. We study the problem of fairly and efficiently allocating the value of a network at any point in time among its...

This study aims at unifying the empirical research on the financial part of the monetary transmission process in the Eurozone between 1993 and 2002. After endogenously determining structural breaks, we select an optimal pass-through model for a series of national retail interest rates for each...

In this paper we enrich the Brabander (1981) and Brander and Krugman (1983) model of reciprocal entry by placing it i a setting of two-sided asymetric information. Following the limit pricing methodology of Milgrom and Roberts (1982), we show that the limit price is affected by a firm''s desire...

Bureaucratie en bureaucratisering zijn verschijnselen waardoor zowel moderne overheidsorganisaties als moderne ondernemingen worden geplaagd. Aan de bureaucratische organisatievorm kleven zowel voordelen als nadelen. De nadelen ervan worden in de moderne samenleving echter steeds groter. In dit...

We consider a Stackelberg pricing problem in directed networks:Tariffs (prices) have to be defined by an operator, the leader, for a subset of the arcs. Clients, the followers, choose paths to route their demand through the network selfishly and independently of each other, on the basis of...

This study reports the results of an investigation into the profitability of audit engagements. The study is motivated by the frequently expressed concern regarding the lack of competitiveness on the audit market, based on trends of increasing concentration of suppliers in this market. The...