We study the political economy of commuting subsidies in a model of a mono-centric city with two income classes. Depending on housing demand and transport costs, either the rich or the poor live in the central city and the other group in the suburbs. Commuting subsidies increase the net income...

Beyond the traditional debates over information exchange vs flat taxation at source, legislative advances have produced interesting innovations and suggestions concerning how to tax international savings. We examine some of these advances, which we then use to set forth and investigate a...

The trends and consequences of terrorist activities are often captured by counting the number of incidents and casualties. More recently, the effects of terrorist acts on various aspects of the economy have been analyzed. These costs are surveyed and put in perspective. As economic consequences...

The likely extension of the euro area has triggered a debate on the organization of the ECB, in particular on the apparent mismatch between relative economic size and voting rights in the Council. We present a simple model of optimal representation in a federal central bank addressing this...

The object of this paper is to discuss on-line intermediation from the perspective of two-sided markets. It builds a simple model of the intermediation activity when trading partners are involved in a commercial relationship and uses it to illustrate some of the results that emerge in the...

This paper analyzes the a priori influence of the European Parliament (EP) and the Council of Ministers (CM) on legislation of the European Union adopted under its codecision procedure. In contrast to studies which use conventional power indices, both institutions are assumed to act...

This paper provides an analysis of outsourcing and trade in a spatial model – la Hotelling. In this setting, we discuss the trade-off between transport-cost-related disadvantages and outsourcing-induced production cost advantages of a large economy. The model gives a rich picture of possible...

The effects of (private, small-scale) piracy on the pricing behavior of producers of information goods are studied within a unified model of vertical differentiation. Although information goods are assumed to be perfectly horizontally differentiated, demands are interdependent because the...

I derive values of marginal changes in a public good for two-person households, measured alternatively by household member i's willingness to pay (WTP) for the good on behalf of the household, WTPi(H), or by the sum of individual WTP values across family members, WTP(C). Households are assumed...