The primary objective of this paper is to analyse the role of evasion possibilities as a determinant of the general structure of commodity and income taxes and of public goods supply. A secondary objective is to provide a defence of differentiated commodity taxes based on the screening role of...

In this paper, we draw on both the consistent specification testing and the predictive ability testing literatures and propose a test for predictive accuracy which is consistent against generic nonlinear alternatives. Broadly speaking, given a particular reference model, assume that the...

The paper adresses the issue of the distrbution by country of the costs and benefits associated to the introduction of a single currency in Europe, by estimating the relative costs and benefits of the 15 member state through the use of exploratory multivariate statistical techniques. Our results...

Governments have often combined a monetary policy involving setting nominal interest rates with a fiscal policy that did not seek to target a nominal value of the debt stock. In a model with a traditional backward looking Phillips curve, this fiscal and monetary policy mix may not be stable. If...

This paper questions the widespead practice of assessing the hypothesis of long-run fiscal policy sustainability by means of conventional unit-root tests that do not allow for the possible impact of regime shifts. Using the Greek economy as a model case, the Zivot- Andrews squential...

We introduce a class of two-player cooperation games where each player faces a binary decision, enter or exit. These games have a unique Nash equilibrium of entry. However, entry imposes a large enough negative externality on the other player such that the unique social optimum involves the...

Gift giving is thought to be welfare decreasing. This claim rests on two key assumptions, namely, full information as to the whereabouts of all goods and the ability to reach the stores that contain desired goods costlessly. In this paper, we replace these two assumptions with the more realistic...

An approximation to order T-2 is obtained for the bias of the least-squares estimator in the stationary ARX model which yields generalisations of Kendall's and White's classic results for particular variants of AR(1) models. The results show that generally the second-order approximation is...

To study fully endogenous ageing alongside growth and their implications, this paper sets up an OLG economy in which the life expectancy of agents is endogenous. Agents are bearers of children, investors in education and producers and consumers of output. Retirement decision in the last period...

This paper surveys existing explanations for the use of collateral in credit markets and relates them to the empirical evidence on the subject. Collateral may be used as a screening or an incentive device in markets characterized by various forms of asymmetric and biased information. The...