A quota on foreign competition will generally lead to quality-upgrading (downgrading) of the low-quality (high-quality) firm, an increase in average quality, a reduction of quality differentiation, and a reduction of domestic consumer surplus, irrespective of whether the foreign firm produces...

Several recent papers have shown the relevance of collective models for the empirical investigation of household labor supply and consumption. Yet the estimation of collective models in the presence of non-linear budget sets and participation decisions remains a daunting task. This paper...

To meet its commitment under the Kyoto Protocol, the EU plans to implement an emissions trading system with grandfathering of allowances. Besides having distributional impacts, the choice of the grandfathering scheme may affect efficiency if firms anticipate how future allocations depend on...

In a framework of a unionised oligopoly, this paper reconsiders the impact of the bargaining structure on union wages. In particular, two dimensions along which centralisation may occur, namely the professional and firm line, are integrated into one modelling framework. It will be shown that,...

Many budget surveys present the interesting features that for a wide range of goods they contain quantity information along with expenditure information, and that the geographical location of households is fairly precise. We take advantage of these features to develop a method for estimation of...

Using business survey data on German manufacturing firms, this paper provides tests for hypotheses formulated in capital market imperfection theories that predict distributional effects in the transmission of monetary policy. The business conditions of small firms are found to be somewhat more...

We compare the numerical methods that are most widely applied in the computation of the standard business cycle model with flexible labor. The numerical techniques imply economically insignificant differences with regard to business cycle summary statistics except for the volatility of...

The paper examines the interaction among taxes on factors income, environmental quality and welfare. We construct a two-country regional block model with capital mobility and crossborder pollution. Pollution in the two countries is simultaneously abated by the private sector, in response to a...

Virtually all empirical firm-level studies on the demand for labor do not include labor cost in the econometric specification. This is due to the fact that business and innovation survey data usually lack information on labor cost. This paper shows how reliable skill-specific and firm-specific...