Despite the centrality of the issue of labour market flexibility for policy and academic research, attempts to consistently measure leve ls of flexibility, either within or across countries, have been remarkably scarce. This paper presents a complete set of labour market flexibility indicators...

Necessary and sufficient conditions are given for the existence of an Order isomorphism from a given preference relation to Euclidean n-dimensional space ordered by Pareto dominance. This result provides representation for some preference relations not representable by utility functions. It also...

In this paper we study the nature of predatory behaviour in an oligopolistic framework. We use the long-purse story of financial vulnerability to demonstrate that predatory behaviour is less likely to occur in an oligopoly than in a monopoly. We show the nature of the free-rider problem, and...

It is often taken for granted that if more firms were innately honest or ethical in the way they behaved, this would be a good thing. In this paper we use the example of environmental regulation to show that such a claim cannot, in general, be sustained. If regulation is by pollution tax we show...

Developing country leaders typically resemble proprietors more than benevolent social planners, i.e., they are powerful individuals pursuing their own interests while they remain in power. We model growth in a "proprietary economy" facing each period an endogenous probability of "political...

In this paper we study the relationship between legislature size with respect to general government and welfare spending. According to the theory, legislature size has an indefinite effect on government spending because logrolling and transaction costs have canceling effects. Bicameralism is...

This paper structurally estimates an equilibrium model of the marriage market using data from the British Cohort Study. The results suggest that both search frictions and selective behaviour determine who marries whom and when, and that education is the most important determinant of an...

We document that monetary policy inertia can help alleviate problems of indeterminacy and non-existence of stationary equilibrium observed for some commonly-studied monetary policy rules. We also find that inertia promotes learnability of equilibrium. The context is a simple, forward-looking...

Monetary policy is sometimes formulated in terms of a target level of inflation, a fixed time horizon and a constant interest rate that is anticipated to achieve the target at the specified horizon. These requirements lead to constant interest rate (CIR) instrument rules. Using the standard New...

It is often argued that cooperative firms are financially less viable than ivestor-owned firms. From a fundamental point of view, however, this does not seem a fair comparison, since the market for firm ownership is usually only available to investor-owned firms in our economy. This paper...