We review how technological advances and changes in regulation may shape the (future) geographical scope of banking. We first review how both physical distance and the presence of borders currently affect bank lending conditions (loan pricing and credit availability) and market presence...

The aim of this paper is to find out whether the Balassa-Samuelson effect is important in EMU. We use panel data going from 1970 to 1995 for the current EU members in order to estimate the long run effect of bilateral differences in productivity growth differential between the traded and...

The paper studies a regional environmental tax reform in a federal state. A region unilaterally improves the environmental quality by increasing its energy taxes. The regional government recycles the excess tax revenues by lowering either pre-existing distorting labor or capital taxes. This...

We prove the existence of an upper bound for the number of blockings required to get from one imputation to another provided that accessibility holds. The bound depends only on the number of players in the TU game considered. For the class of games with non-empty cores this means that the core...

This paper evaluates optimal monetary policy rules within the context of a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model estimated for the Euro Area. Under assumption of an ad hoc loss function for the central bank, we compute the unconditional losses both under discretion and commitment. We...

In this paper, we explore automobile fuel efficiency policies in the presence of two externalities i) a global environmental problem and ii) international innovation spillovers. Using a simple model with two regions, we show that both a fuel tax and a tax on vehicles based on their fuel economy...

Knowledge on the scale economies drives the incentives of regulators, governments and individual utilities to scale-up or scale-down the scale of operations. This paper considers the returns to scale (RTS) in non-convex frontier models. In particular, we evaluate RTS assumptions in a Free...

This paper studies the relationship between the stock market and the exchange rate in several countries. The approach taken in the first part of this study is a linear VAR, to be compared in the following part to a MSVAR. The data is also analyzed by Granger causality tests in both contexts and...

This model explicitly incorporates the dynamic aspects of conservation programs with incomplete compliance and it allows landholders’ behavior to change over time. A distinction is made between initial and continuing compliance. We find that incomplete and instrument-specific enforcement can...