The number of preferential trade agreements has greatly increased over the past two decades, yet most existing bilateral arrangements take the form of free trade areas, and less than ten percent can be considered to be fully fledged customs unions. This paper develops a political economy model...

The model developed in this paper admits a systematic discussion of the normative rationale behind the use of two distributive instruments: negative income taxation, creating an unconditional basic income, on the one hand and wage subsidies on the other hand. The model integrates two opposite...

This paper presents an ordered logit approach to model the optimal timing of buying a house in the life cycle. The model is applied to three recent Belgian household budget surveys. We find that households postpone homeownership or choose to be lifelong tenant due to an increase of the...

In this paper we compare the stabilizing properties of the EMU to those of a ERM system, controlled by Germany. We find that in general the EMU will provide better stabilization of inflation, output and the interest rate than the EMS system. However, these results only apply if the ECB can...

The adverse distributional effects of a flat tax are well known and have been documented by empirical research in several countries, including Belgium. Advocates of the flat tax argue, correctly, that these studies do not take into account agents’ behavioural reactions and possible feed back...

This paper explores a couple of specific operational interpretations of Sen's approach in view of assessing the extent to which the results originated by the implementation of Sen's concepts are influenced by the choice of the specific technique. By means of a survey based on a representative...

How do incentives to engage in costly signaling depend on social structure? This paper formalises and extends Thorstein Veblen’s theory of how costly signaling by conspicuous consumption depends on social structure. A noisy signaling game is introduced in which spectators observe signals only...

We combine stylized facts from social network literature with findings from the literature on the gender wage gap in a formal model. This model is based on employers’ use of social networks in the hiring process in order to assess employee productivity. As a result, there is a persistent...

The empirical relationship between financial openness and growth is examined in this paper. In contrast to a large body of cross-country work investigating this link, I study the impact of financial integration on growth at the industry level. This paper provides evidence that financial openness...

This article examines the price dispersion in the European Union in the last fifteen years (1990-2005). The analysis of price convergence is examined on aggregate and disaggregate levels. The macro approach is based on Comparative Price Level index calculated as the ratio between PPPs and...