An expanding state has to decide how to tax the newly conquered lands, most likely taxed under a different regime. It can either preserve the prevailing system of taxation or change it to conform to its own system. The choice depends on the relative efficiency of the two systems, political...

During the 70?s, the outstanding achievement of the ?Third Italy? led to the rehabilitation of the Marshallian concept of industrial district and to a growing number of studies on the productive system whose development can be mostly explained by the geographical concentration of activities. At...

Travel time losses in the Netherlands are likely to get worse in the years ahead if capacity is not added to cope with the demand. This particularly creates problems for business travel, which is characterized by a high “value of time”. In the Netherlands, policy makers have a long-standing...

Economists argue that rich information environments and formal enforcement of contracts are necessary to prevent market failures when information asymmetries exist. We test for the necessity of formal enforcement to overcome the problems of asymmetric information by estimating the value of...

Awarding a grand prize to the player who wins most often in a series of contests links the contests together and makes incentives in the current contest depend upon past performance. A lucky player who wins early faces relatively stronger incentives to exert effort because of his early success....

In classic matching games, individuals choose their partners and each pair chooses a contract from a finite set of feasible contracts; the existence of stable allocations then follows from the (generalized) Deferred Acceptance algorithm. We consider an extension where the contract set is a...

Research background: The preparedness for outbreaks of pandemics such as the COVID-19 is a major concern for health authorities and leaders as extensive studies in the past have been reported and well documented. However, engaging with the response to an outbreak demands many decisions with...

This paper provides risk/reward evaluation and legal analysis of foreign investing under Cuban Law No. 118 (2014). Section I addresses dynamic changes in Cuba since 2008. Section II examines reforms of Cuban foreign investment laws. Section III explores investment options such as import/export,...

We examine commission splits between listing and selling agents in real estate transactions. We construct a theoretical model to show that agency problems arise when a listing agent attempts to maximize his or her payoff while setting the commission split. Mitigation to these agency problems can...

This study examines whether companies employ corporate social responsibility (CSR) to improve employee engagement and mitigate adverse behavior at the workplace (e.g., shirking, absenteeism, etc.). We exploit plausibly exogenous changes in state unemployment insurance (UI) benefits from 1991 to...