Jan Tinbergen helped creating the Dutch Central Planning Bureau after 1945, and Dutch society has benefitted enormously up to this very day in 2004. The Dutch situation has also been an example to the world. But there is a down side when the CPB adopts a wrong theory and when policy becomes...

The world has 6 billion people, and rising, and we like them all to know a little bit of economics. This means that there is a huge market for economic theory, economics textbooks and teachers. As groups of economists have the objective to get a little bit of the action, a key strategy seems to...

Rational agents would opt for world government, properly defined. Without world government, dealings between sovereign states are not only affected by the military and economic power of those states and by the international bodies that they agree upon to wield and control their power, like the...

An important aspect for economics and its methodology is the relation between its definitions and the reality that those definitions (should) reflect. Creative minds coin definitions that maximize explanatory power. An example that highlights this phenomenon can be found in physics and notably...

When cleaning up my archives I came across a short article of April 1991 co-authored with Jan Tinbergen, on what the Soviet Union might learn from OECD countries in economics and politics. The article apparently never got published, partly since the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991. Jan...

"Approval Voting" is the voting mechanism reportedly used since 1987 by professional and scientific societies such as the Econometric Society, INFORMS, ASA, AMS, MAA, IEEE and the Social Choice and Welfare Society. The method lacks a sound moral base for the choice by individual members between...

Several recent papers argue that contracts provide reference points that affect ex post behavior. We test this hypothesis in a canonical buyer-seller relationship with renegotiation. Our paper provides causal experimental evidence that an initial contract has a highly significant and...

We present an international trade model with multiproduct firms. Firms are heterogeneously endowed with two types of capabilities that jointly determine the trade-off within firms between managing a large portfolio of products and producing at low marginal cost. The model can explain many of the...

This paper reports data from a laboratory experiment on two-period moral hazard problems. The findings corroborate the contract-theoretic insight that even though the periods are technologically unrelated, due to incentive considerations principals can benefit from offering long-term contracts...

We study a continuous-time game of strategic experimentation in which the players try to assess the failure rate of some new equipment or technology. Breakdowns occur at the jump times of a Poisson process whose unknown intensity is either high or low. In marked contrast to existing models, we...