In a corrupt tax administration a rise in tax rate sets about complicated strategic moves by both taxpayers and administrators. It is shown that in some circumstances, this may bring about a Laffer like behavior of overall tax revenue, i.e. a higher tax rate results in smaller net revenue for...

This paper examines the political economy of trade policy in the context of a small open economy, when factor ownerships are variable. The median voter hypothesis is used. In the long run, both trade protection and distribution of wealth and income are endogenous, and the paper investigates how...

We examine the incentives for a government to levy an optimal tariff on a foreign monopolist. With complete information, the home government uses tariffs to extract rents and therefore implements a policy of discriminatory tariffs entailing higher tariffs on more efficient firms. By contrast if...

We estimate the determinants of earnings for both the self-employed and wage/salary sectors in an economy undergoing transition from socialism to greater market orientation. We adopt a (full information) MLE methodology in addition to Heckman's two-step method, while taking both participation...

This paper studies an exchange economy with a finite number of agents in which each agent is initially endowed with a finite number of (personalized) indivisible commodities. We observe that the core equivalence theorem may not hold for this economy when the coalitional form game is generated in...

Falling house prices have caused numerous home owners to suffer capital losses. Those with little home equity may be prevented from moving because proceeds from the sale of their house are insufficient to repay their mortgage and provide a new down payment. A data set of mortgages is used to...

This paper examines maximum likelihood estimation via hill climbing and the expectations maximization (EM) algorithm in the context of Hamilton's Markov switching framework. The techniques are explained in detail and are followed by a discussion of both analytic and computational issues. Both...

The problem of competitiveness has becoming one of the main concerns of European governments. This is reflected trough out the Europe 2020 Strategy that includes as key priority the promotion of efficient and productive use of inputs. Differently to other "well-behaved" European "neighbours", in...

We investigate the e ect of monetary policy on European macroeconomic variables using a small-scale vector autoregression (VAR) and the "Effective Monetary Stimulus" (EMS). The EMS is a monetary policy metric obtained from yield curve data that is designed to consistently reflect the overall...