We show that macroeconomic movements have strong effects on the happiness of nations. First, we find that there are clear microeconomic patterns in the psychological well-being levels of a quarter of a million randomly sampled Europeans and Americans from the 1970's to the 1990's. Happiness...

Standard Economics assumes that decision makers carefully reflect and meditate on each alternative. Grounded on evidence from Psychology this thesis relaxes this assumption and develops a theoretical framework with imperfect reflection. We analyse the implications for both Positive and Normative...

There is a considerable variation in estimates of the degree of risk aversion in the literature. This paper analyses the behaviour of contestants in one of the most popular TV gameshows ever to estimate a CRRA model of behaviour. This gameshow has a number of features that makes it well suited...

We study a discrete time dynamic game of price competition with spatially differentiated products and price adjustment costs. We characterise the Markov perfect and the open-loop equilibrium of our game. We find that in the steady state Markov perfect equilibrium, given the presence of...

In this paper the authors calculate OCA-indexes for industrial countries in an effort to estimate the benefit-cost ratio of adopting a common currency. The results correspond to the estimation of Bayoumi and Eichengreen (1997b) and show that the ranking of the economies suitable to form a...

In this paper,a method is introduced for approximating the likelihood for the unknown parameters of a state space model.The approximation converges to the true likelihood as the simulation size goes to infinity. In addition,the approximating likelihood is continuous as a function of the unknown...

This paper examines characteristics of cooperative behavior in a repeated, n-person, continuous action generalization of a Prisoner?s Dilemma game. When time preferences are heterogeneous and bounded away from one, how ?much? cooperation can be achieved by an ongoing group? How does group...

The optimum currency area (OCA) theory tries to answer an almost prohibitively difficult question: what is the optimal number of currencies to be used in one region. The difficulty of the question leads to a low operational precision of OCA theory. Therefore, we argue that the OCA theory is a...

This article conceptualises the marked downturn in UK house prices in the 2007-2009 period in relation to longer-term processes of national economic restructuring centred on a new model of homeownership. The structure of UK house prices has been impacted markedly by the Labour Government?s...

The implementation of the Maastricht criteria, establishment of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), creation of the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) raised several challenges for the European Union (EU) countries. The main aim of this dissertation is to...