This paper examines how professional female tennisplayers react to: i) prize incentives and ii) heterogeneity in ex ante players’ abilities. It is found that a larger prize spread encourages women to increase effort, even when controlling for many tournament and player characteristics. Further...

Ce rapport de recherche :(1) analyse l’évolution récente des finances publiques locales en Région bruxelloise (ressources fiscales et non fiscales, régionales, communales, etc.) ;(2) simule les effets d’une baisse de la fiscalité communale sur les budgets locaux (« pertes à compenser...

Better understand the consequences of unemployment in terms of labour market opportunities as well as psychological well-being is of primary importance for any policies aimed at reducing unemployment. One way by which unemployment may impact on future labour market outcomes is through a...

According to Adam Smith, self-deceit is essential to the economy. In this light the paper draws on the Theory of Moral Sentiments and revisits Adam Smith’s view of the self. The originality of Smith’s account of self-deceit is seen in his insights into self-regulating social forces. The...

In this paper we compare the institutional evolution of the higher education systems in France and England from 1980 onwards. These two systems are interesting case-studies as they correspond to two topical opposite positions in terms of their elaborative structures :the French system was...

This research investigates how bankruptcy law influences the design of debt contracts and the investment choice through the sanction of faulty managers. We model a lending relationship between a small firm and a monopolistic bank which decides the loan rate. The firm may perform asset...

Sinds vrijwel twintig jaar, spits het debat over de verloning van arbeid zich in grote mate toe op de probematiek van de concurrentiekracht. De loonkostenproblematiek is uiteraard belangrijk, maar men vergeet daarbij soms dat niet alle Belgische werknemers over dezelfde kam geschoren mogen...

This paper assesses the relationship between institutions, output, and productivity, when official output is corrected for the size of the shadow economy. Our results confirm the usual positive impact of institutional quality on official output and total factor productivity, and its negative...

Using the data collected for the year 2004 in the Belgian Health Survey, we aim to show that, controlling for all the determinants of self-reported health state, there is a residual effect of geographic location on the self-assessed health, namely a more favourable scoring for individuals that...

This paper aims at assessing the magnitude of R&D spillover effects on large international R&D companies’ productivity growth. In particular, we investigate the extent to which R&D spillover effects are intensified by both geographic and technological proximities between spillover generating...