This paper investigates the economics of ”blue laws” or restrictions on shop-opening hours, most commonly imposed on Sunday trading. We show that in the presence of communal leisure or ”ruinous competition” externalities, retail regulations can have real effects in a simple general...

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This paper presents a sequential model suited to analyze transitions between equilibria. Disequilibrium dynamics are obtained from a standard monopolistic competition model, by introducing a sequential structure and reasonable hypotheses about technology, finance constraints, expectation...

The residential UK electricity market was opened for the first time in 1999, introducing choice of supplier, and about 40% of households changed supplier in the first four years. After three years price caps were removed. We review this process and assess the competitiveness of the market by...

We model the organization of the firm as a type of artificial neural network in a duopoly framework. The firm plays a repeated Prisoner's Dilemma type game, but also must learn to map environmental signals to demand parameters. We study the prospects for cooperation given the need for the firm...

It is argued that the successive regimes for restructuring sovereign debts, since the early 20th century have been shaped by the articulation of three institutional functions: information gathering and economic expertise, then third-party mediation, lastly policy enforcement, also called...

This paper shows that employment protection is influenced by the male breadwinner conception which is itself shaped by religions. First, by using international individual surveys, we document that Catholics, Muslims and Orthodoxs are more likely to support such "macho values" than Protestants...

Candidate countries of central and eastern Europe (CEECs) are suppose to join the EU in 2004, June, which imply that they will face important challenges in the conduct of macroeconomic policy, in order to be able to enter the ERM-II system and eventually enter the EMU (European Monetary Union)....

L’étude réalisée ici vise à appréhender les effets du vieillissement de la population sur les systèmes de protection sociale de sept pays européens (Allemagne, Espagne, France, Italie, Pays-Bas, Royaume-Uni, Suède) et des États-Unis, en neutralisant autant que possible les autres...

L'appréciation de l’euro depuis le début de la présente décennie, après sa baisse en 1999 et 2000, et l’incertitude sur son évolution future, obscurcissent aujourd’hui l’horizon de la croissance européenne. Mais si l’on observe l’évolution passée de l’euro, reconstituée...