We provide characterizations of preferences representable by a Cobb-Douglas utility function.

In line with the widely applied principle of just deserts, we assume that the severity of the penalty on a contract offender increases in the harm on the other. When this principle holds, the influence of the efficiency of the agreement on the incentives to abide by it crucially depends on...

In most economics textbooks there is a gap between the non-existence of utility functions and the existence of continuous utility functions, although upper semi-continuity is sufficient for many purposes. Starting from a simple constructive approach for countable domains and combining this with...

Student achievement has been identified as an important contributor to economic growth. This paper investigates the hypothesis that redistributive government activities have a negative effect on investment in human capital using data from international comparative student achievement tests in...

In this paper we study the determinants of citizens' trust in the European Central Bank during the start-up phase from 1999-2004. Using a country panel based on the Eurobarometer survey, we find that higher inflation rates reduce trust. Thus people appear to evaluate the performance of the ECB...

The utopia point of a multicriteria optimization problem is the vector that specifies for each criterion the most favourable among the feasible values. The Euclidean compromise solution in multicriteria optimization is a solution concept that assigns to a feasible set the alternative with...

In this paper we investigate the effects of risk preferences and attitudes towards risk on optimal antitrust enforcement policies. First, we observe that risk aversion is negatively correlated with players' proclivity to form a cartel, and that increasing the level of fines while reducing the...

The central prediction of the Aghion et al. (2005) model is an inverted U-shaped relation between innovation and competition. The model is built on the assumption of a product market and has not yet been empirically tested on service-sector firms. Using detailed firm-level data, we find the...

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...