What determines the activity and lethality of militant groups? To answer this question, a two-step count method disentangles activity and lethality in terms of ideology, capacity, and environmental factors. A first step assesses the determinants of group activity, measured by the number of...

We study how social and economic conditions relate to the health status of children using a retrospective survey for Western-Europe. We use the state of the business cycle and the level of Gross Domestic Product as indicators of the macroeconomic conditions. In order to differentiate between...

Welfare is often administered locally, but financed through grants from the central government. This raises the question how the central government can prevent local governments from spending more than necessary. Block grants are more efficient than matching grants, because the latter reduce the...

This paper investigates whether political pressure from incumbent<br/>presidents influences the Fed?s monetary policy during the period that Alan Greenspan was the chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Board. A modified Taylor rule - featuring the inflation rate and the unemployment<br/>gap rather...

What are the effects of child care subsidies on education, fertility and the sectoral allocation of the labour force? In a general equilibrium setting the availability of affordable professional child care will have an impact on the relative supplies of educated and uneducated workers and the...

Indicators of central bank independence (CBI) based on the interpretation central bank laws in place may not capture the actual independence of the central bank. This paper develops an indicator of actual independence of the Bank Indonesia (BI), the central bank of Indonesia, for the period...

Clinical trials provide pivotal evidence on drug efficacy and safety. The evidence, information from clinical trials, is currently used by regulatory decision makers in marketing authorization decisions, but only in an implicit manner. For clinical trials information to be used in a transparent...

We study cartel stability in an industry that is subject to uniform yardstick regulation. In a theoretical model, we show that the number of symmetric firms does not affect collusion. In a laboratory experiment, however, we do find an effect. If anything, increasing the number of firms...