With the completion of EMU, tax competition and, more in general, locational competition is high on the EU policy agenda. In contrast to the standard neo-classical reasoning, recent advances in the theory of trade and location have shown that tax competition does not necessarily lead to a...

We model the development of world records of metric running events from the 100 meter dash to the marathon for men and women. First, we review methods to fit time-series curves of world records in general. We discuss methods to estimate curves and review candidate functional forms that fit the...

We study the role of takeover threats as a corporate control mechanism using Aghion and Tirole's (1997) model of formal and real authority. Shareholders do not monitor the manager's actions, since ownership is widely dispersed. A corporate raider may monitor, and steps in if a profit opportunity...

Based on a new economic geography model by Puga (1999), we use the equilibrium wage equation to estimate two key structural model parameters for the NUTS II EU regions. The estimation of these parameters enables us to come up with an empirically based free-ness of trade parameter. We then...

The effectiveness of policies to reduce the use of energy depend on the elasticity of substitution between the various inputs and on the rate of technological progress. This paper presents a theoretical model emphasising energy investments\' characteristics of uncertainty and irreversibility...

Inter-generational externalities associated with the conservation of the environment are usually tackled through fiscal policy. The recent increase in socially responsible investment funds creates a potential role for the stock market to deal with these environmental externalities. We study this...

Generally, a currency crisis is defined to occur if an index of currency pressure exceeds a threshold. This paper compares several currency crisis dating methods adopting different definitions of currency pressure indexes and ad-hoc and extreme value based thresholds. We illustrate the methods...

This paper examines the investment-uncertainty relationship for a panel of Dutch firms. The uncertainty proxy is derived from daily stock market prices of individual firms. We show that some macro indicators, in combination with firm fixed effects, are able to give a reasonable explanation of...

This paper investigates the implications of progressively broadening the scope of the market of tradable permits from no emissions trading to full global trading. We start with the no emissions trading case where each Annex I country must individually meet its Kyoto targets. Next, we consider a...

The paper studies simple strategies of labor tax reform in a search and matching model of the labor market featuring endogenous labor supply. Changing the composition of the tax wedge---that is, reducing a payroll tax and increasing a progressive wage tax such that the marginal tax wedge remains...