It is commonly argued that high tax rates motivate individuals to start a business as it is easier to avoid and evade taxes if self-employed compared to employed. If this is the case we would expect small business owners to be more responsive to tax rate changes than employees. This study...

The focus in this study is on how efficiency in public education is affected by competition from private schools. The Swedish educational system is used, since the Swedish large scale voucher program implies that private and public schools compete on similar terms. In 2002 approximately 5% of...

This paper analyses the credibility of author anonymity provided by double-blind review processes. It is argued that authors have strong incentives to disseminate information about their papers before publication. A sample from two economics journals, both using double-blind review processes...

This paper evaluates the new theories of trade and economic geography in the light of the pattern of regional specialisation in Southern Africa. The analysis is applied to the nine South African provinces and the SADC member countries of 1995, except Angola. Based on Gini coefficients, the...

The donor community provided around $400 billion in debt relief to developing countries between 1989 and 2004. This paper empirically assesses the impact of debt relief on growth and investment by examining two potential mechanisms. The resource mechanism refers to the resources made available...

This paper examines the forecasting properties of a Markov regime-switching model applied to Swedish interest rate volatility. A Monte Carlo testing procedure is used to arrive at a three state specification that is able to capture the high degree of leptokurtosis in the data without additional...

The purpose of this paper is to perform a detailed examination of corruption effects on trade based on corruption characteristics known to affect economic exchange within the corruption research field. These characteristics are the level, prevalence, customs location, function and predictability...

A main component of customs unions is a common trade policy on imports from non-member countries. Trade policy covers both tariff and non-tariff barriers like trade procedures. We argue that since trade procedures vary markedly across EU countries, the EU is not, strictly speaking, a customs...

This paper analyses distributional effects of revenue-neutral tax reforms aimed at improving dietary quality and encouraging healthier grain consumption. Using data on household grain purchases, we analyse both the impact on dietary quality and the tax incidence among income groups of VAT...

This paper experimentally investigates free-riding behavior on communication cost in a coordination game and finds strong indications of such free-riding. Firstly, the subjects tend to wait for others to send a message when communication is costly, which does not happen when communication is...