This paper examines the perspectives of Russian gas exports to Western Europe and the strategic options of the CIS gas transiting countries, namely Ukraine and Belarus. The development of a new transit corridor through Belarus (the Yamal-Europe pipeline), depriving Ukraine of its former...

This paper reviews the literature on the effects of low steady-state inflation on wage formation, focusing on four different effects. First, under low inflation, downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR) may prevent real wage cuts that would have happened had inflation been higher. Second, wages...

The Value-at-Risk calculation reduces the dimensionality of the risk factor space. The main reasons for such simplifications are, e.g., technical efficiency, the logic and statistical appropriateness of the model. In Chapter 2 we present three simple mappings: the mapping on the market index,...

Bayesian learning provides a core concept of information processing in financial markets. Typically it is assumed that market participants perfectly know the quality of released news. However, in practice, news' precision is rarely disclosed. Therefore, we extend standard Bayesian learning...

We examine international cooperation on technological development as a supplement to, or an alternative to, international cooperation on emission reductions. R&D should be increased beyond the non-cooperative level if (i) the technology level in one country is positively affected by R&D in other...

We study a search model with employment protection legislation. We show that if the output from the match is uncertain ex ante, there may exist a discriminatory equilibrium where workers with the same productive characteristics are subject to different hiring standards. If a bad match takes...

We study the impact of the arrival of macroeconomic news on the informational and noise-driven components in high-frequency quote processes and their conditional variances. Bid and ask returns are decomposed into a common ('efficient return') factor and two market-side-specific components...

Recent rounds of GATT and later WTO have advocated widespread tariffication, meaning that existing non-tariff barriers be converted into import equivalent tariffs. From an economic point of view, the effects of such tariffication are not entirely clear. The paper presents a general equilibrium...

We consider a model of an information network where nodes can fail and transmission of information is costly. The formation of paths in such networks is modeled as the Nash equilibrium of an N player routing game. The task of obtaining this equilibrium is shown to be NP-Hard. We derive...

Rank-order tournaments are usually modeled simultaneously. However, real tournaments are often sequentially. We show that agents' strategic behavior significantly differs in sequential tournaments compared to simultaneous tournaments. In a sequential tournament, under certain conditions the...