Who gains from more information on the quality of pharmaceutical drugs? Are there incentives for voluntary post-approval clinical trials among pharmaceutical companies? Contrary to popular belief, this paper shows that it is not in the consumer interest that clinical evidence establishing the...

This paper examines aggregate savings in a general equilibrium model where infinitely lived households face volatile (and possibly uncertain) income paths, hold a risk-free asset, and face a liquidity constraint. I first show that the equilibrium capital stock in an economy without uncertainty,...

Prefetching is a simple and general method for single-chain parallelisation of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm based on the idea of evaluating the posterior in parallel and ahead of time. Improved Metropolis-Hastings prefetching algorithms are presented and evaluated. It is shown how to use...

The Dasgupta-Heal-Solow-Stiglitz model of capital accumulation and resource depletion poses the following sustainability problem: is it feasible to sustain indefinitely a level of consumption that is bounded away from zero? We provide a complete technological characterization of the...

We study immigration policy in a small receiving economy under self-selection of migrants. We show that a non-discriminatory immigration policy choice affects and is affected by the migratory decisions of skilled and unskilled foreign workers. From this interaction multiple equilibria may arise,...

Taking a political economy perspective this paper proposes an alternative carbon abatement policy instrument with significant advantages over existing policy instruments. The key feature of the proposed carbon securities is that they entitle their owners to a fixed proportion of ex ante unknown...

This paper deals with the question how to model health effects after the cessation of a randomised controlled trial (RCT). Using clinical trial data on severe congestive heart failure patients we illustrate how survival beyond the cessation of a RCT can be predicted based on parametric survival...

In this paper we show the consequences of applying a panel unit root test when testing for a purchasing power parity relationship. The distribution of the tests investigated, including the IPS test of Im et al (1997), are influenced by a common stochastic trend which is usually not accounted...

This paper shows that monetary policy should be delegated to a central bank that cross-checks optimal policy with information from the Taylor rule. Attaching some weight to deviations of the interest rate from the interest rate prescribed by the Taylor rule is beneficial if the central bank aims...