The Netherlands is well known for its high employment growth and corresponding low unemployment rate. At various occasions the so-called Dutch miracle has been applauded, together with the underlying ‘Polder model’. A feature that initially was less recognised in the international debate,...

We propose a new model to study the role of commitment as a sourceof strategic bargaining power. Two impatient players bargain aboutthe division of a pie under a standard bargaining protocol indiscrete time with time-invariant recognition probabilities.Instantaneous utility is linear, but...

This paper briefly analyses the shifts in economic theory that have moved policy makers from unambiguously pursuing full employment, to the current state where full employability is justified as being optimal. We also explore how these theoretical developments translated in practice, culminating...

A general collective decision problem is analysed. It consists in many issues that are interconnected in two ways: by mutual constraints and by connections of relevance. The goal is to decide on the issues by respecting the mutual constraints and by aggregating in accordance with an...

In a model with a continuum of voters with symmetric single-peaked preferences on the one-dimensional unit interval (representing the political spectrum) a voting rule assigns to each profile of votes a point in the interval. We characterize all voting rules that are strategy-proof, anonymous,...

We analyse worker self-selection with a special focus on teachers. The point of the paper is that worker composition is generally endogenous, due to worker selfselection. In a first step we analyse lab experimental data to provide causal evidence on particular sorting patterns. This evidence...

This paper is concerned with polynomial time approximations schemes for the generalized geometric problems with geographic clustering. We illustrate the approach on the generalized traveling salesman problem which is also known as Group-TSP or TSP with neighborhoods. We prove that under the...

Given a family of linear budget sets, an allocation is equal opportunity equivalent (Thomson, 1994) if there exists a common budget set such that each agent is indi¤erent between the bundle that he gets and the best bundle he can obtain in the choice set. We first study therobustness properties...

We study the online version of the classical parallel machine scheduling problem to minimize the total weighted completion time from a new perspective: We assume a strategic setting, where the data of each job j, namely its release date r(j) , its processing time p(j) and its weight w(j) is only...

This paper studies and assesses the impact of G3 Central Bank interventions on the DEM/USD exchange rate properties using daily realized moments of exchange rate returns (obtained from intraday data) for the period 1989-2001. Event studies in terms of the realized moments for the intervention...