In the course of 2006, Gazprom sharply increased gas prices for Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia and Moldova. This paper assesses (i) to what extent Europe is vulnerable to similar use of market power by Russia, and (ii) to what extent the construction of strategic gas storage could help Europe to...

ELIE can be interpreted as a minimum income scheme, financed by lump-sum taxes. It may induce social waste as individuals with a low taste for working may opt for voluntary unemployment. We simulate the magnitude of this social waste with microdata for Belgium and compare ELIE with a firstbest...

In intertemporal asset pricing models, transaction costs are usually neglected. In this paper we explicitly incorporate transaction costs in these models and analyze to what extent this extension is helpful in explaining the cross-section of expected returns. An empirical analysis using CRSP...

The financial crises of the 1990s have given a new impetus to proposals aimed at controlling international capital movements. Well-known economists came out in favour of such controls, giving (some of these) capital controls a new respectability. In this paper we want to evaluate these...

This paper extends the framework provided by De Grauwe, Dewachter and Aksoy (1998). Monetary policy effectiveness of the European Central Bank (ECB) in the open economy Euroland is addressed. The optimal feedback rules for the member states with the use of the backward looking variables are...

In this paper 16 different voting procedures for one-seat elections are analysed: the rules of Borda, Condorcet, Black, Copeland, Simpson, Hare, Coombs, Baldwin, Nanson and the plurality, anti-plurality, majority, approval and runoff rules. The 2 criteria we use as a measure for the validity of...

Farmers in developing countries are confronted with imperfect markets. This has an impact on their production activities. When implementing developing projects these market imperfections should be taken into account. This paper is an attempt to discuss the impact of imperfect markets in the...

Recent empirical research has found that the strong short-term relationship between US monetary aggregates and macroeconomic fundamentals, as outlined in the classical study of M. Friedman and Schwartz, mostly disappeared since the early 1980s. In the light of B. Friedman and Kuttner (1992)...