By distinguishing between discretionary and non-discretionary fiscal policy, this paper analyses the stability of fiscal rules for EMU countries before and after the Maastricht Treaty. Using both Instrumental Variables and GMM techniques, it turns out that discretionary fiscal policy has...

We propose a new class of voting rules, called Size Approval Voting. According to this rule, the effective weight of a vote from a given individual depends on how many other alternatives the very same individual votes for. In particular, weights are assumed to be non-negative and weakly...

Brams (2003) presents three paradoxes for power indices: some rather counter-intuitive behaviour that is exhibited by both the Shapley-Shubik and the Banzhaf indices. We show that the proportional index is free from such paradoxical behaviour. This result suggests that our intuition may be based...

Recent empirical work shows that ongoing international financial integration facilitatescross-country consumption risk sharing. While these studies employ absolute measures toaccount for a country''s integration in international capital markets, we devise a relativemeasure that captures the...

We introduce a new method of varying the risk that bidders face in first-price private value auctions. We find that decreasing bidders’ risk significantly reduces the degree of overbidding relative to the risk-neutral Bayesian-Nash equilibrium prediction. This implies that risk affects bidding...

We show that for any roommate market the set of stochastically stable matchings coincideswith the set of absorbing matchings. This implies that whenever the core is non-empty (e.g.,for marriage markets), a matching is in the core if and only if it is stochastically stable, i.e., stochastic...

ANWB, the Dutch automobile association, provides assistance, car repair andreplacement services to its nearly 4 million members. ANWB services around 1.3 millionrequests per year in The Netherlands. Historically, the operational planning process ofassigning requests to service men was regionally...

In this paper we develop a model to describe a firm’s demand for two production factors which is subject to the presence of nonconvex adjustment costs. In our model simultaneous adjustment of these two production factors may either increase or decrease the total costs incurred by the firm. The...

We show that the invariant method (Pinski and Narin, 1976), recently axiomatised by Palacios-Huerta and Volij (2004), and used to quality-rank academic journals is subject to manipulation: a journal can boost its performance by making additional citations to other journals.

We show that the invariant method (Pinski and Narin, 1976), recently axiomatised by Palacios-Huerta and Volij (2004), and used to quality-rank academic journals is subject to manipulation: a journal can boost its performance by making additional citations to other journals.