The Lisbon Strategy demands large investments in transport projects, broadband networks and energy infrastructure. Despite the widely-acknowledged need for investments in new infrastructures, European and national public funds are scarce in the current economic climate. Moreover, both...

The Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs intends (i) to unbundle the distribution companies from the commercial companies which are currently in the same holding (supply and generation) and (ii) to allow the Transmission System Operator to manage all the 110 kV grids (currently it manages the 220...

The demand and supply of electricity must always balance. If supply falls short of demand, then price increases or voluntary demand reductions might help to maintain the balance in the system. Should these prove insufficient, then rationing is necessary. Rationing means interrupting the...

This paper discusses reasons why politicians still favor hosting mega events despite the discouraging evidence regarding their financial benefits: (1) early political enthusiasm, (2) tying side-projects to the bid to raise political support, (3) biased reading of history, (4) the winners curse,...

The ambition to host mega sports events is (or can be) perfectly justifiable with various arguments. The most persistently used argument is the supposed financial or direct economic gain for the host economy, of which the compelling body of evidence is discouraging. This implies that the...

This paper has a twofold objective. First, we develop a new method toassess the monetary value for individuals of external effects (viz., aircraftnoise nuisance) which are not or only partly internalized in market prices. The method makes use of an ordinal index of life satisfaction as scored by...

We assess the monetary value of the noise damage, caused by aircraft noise nuisance around Amsterdam Airport, as the sum of hedonic house price differentials and a residual cost component. The residual costs are assessed from a survey, including an ordinal life satisfaction scale, on which...

This paper has a twofold objective. First, we develop a new method to assess the monetary valuefor individuals of external effects. The method makes use of an ordinal index of life satisfaction asscored by individual respondents who are subjected in varying intensity to the external effect....