The literature on catching-up based growth has developed mainly in isolation of other theories on technology and economic growth. This paper presents an industry-level technology gap model in which evolving specialization patterns are the endogenous result of innovation, international technology...

This paper looks at the changes in economic performance across the OECD area during the 1990s. More specifically it reviews the explanations for differences in growth and relative levels of productivity and per capita income. Firstly it looks at the performance of labour market indicators, such...

It is known that the option of delegation in a rent-seeking contest between two individuals leads to a prisoner's dilemma. In equilibrium no player hires a delegate, while it is Pareto-efficient if both would hire one. This paper shows that this result does not generalize to a contest between...

This paper examines whether the pass-through of monetary policy measures in 6 EMU countries has become more similar over time. The countries included are: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, and the sample period is 1980-2000. We conclude that major differences in...

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...

The model in Verboven (2002) is extended to include non-zero price elasticities and behavior in the fuel market is modelled explicitly. With the aid of simulations it is shown, that this makes quite a difference and, therefore, might lead to bias in parameter estimates.

Some economic models need constraints imposed on control and/or state-space constraints. In most cases, nonetheless, the use of constraints is avoided because it brings significant technical difficulties to a model. This paper offers a new practical technique to solve control and state-space...

Eastern enlargement of the EU promises gains, but also imposes fiscal costs on incumbent countries. A sensitive issue concerns immigration, jobs and wages. We address these issues in a general equilibrium framework, both analytically and through numerical simulations. Analytical results identify...

In this paper we try to measure oil price uncertainty. The measure of uncertainty is based on the conditional standard deviations which are derived from univariate (G)ARCH models. The measure of uncertainty we choose is the within-year high-low range of the conditional standard deviations. It is...

We show by means of a bank relationship model that after monetary policy tightening, public firms are more likely to decrease their demand for bank loans than private firms, which are typically more dependent on bank credit and benefit more from relationship lending. In order to test this...