We discuss attempts to justify conditional cooperation in the Prisoners’ Dilemma based on the idea of identifying an opponent’s strategy. We note that the concept of such complete transparency of decision procedures is logically inconsistent. Furthermore, we observe that attempts to justify...

The symmetry of an electronic limit order book is studied using high-frequency data. Is the order flow generated by buyers of the same structure as the one by sellers or would factors such as short selling restrictions and information trading result in asymmetries in the order flow? A model...

This paper investigates the real effects of debt or tax financing of a given level of government consumption. The paper starts with a survey of the theoretical literature, ranging from Ricardian to Keynesian models. The conclusion from the survey is that the real effects of budget deficits are...

Previous studies indicate that the general public would prefer to reallocate medical resources from old people to young ones, and also has a low WTP for measures that increase the survival probability at an advanced age. In this paper, we present an analysis of the value of a ‘blip’, i.e. an...

Post World War II European welfare states experienced several decades of relatively low unemployment, followed by a plague of persistently high unemployment since the 1980s. We impute the higher unemployment to welfare states' diminished ability to cope with more turbulent economic times, such...

The paper explores the implications for explaining the endogenous formation of jurisdictions of modelling the political process as a costly fight to acquire shares of the GNP pie. It is shown, in particular, that a system of federalism is especially significant in ameliorating distributional...

Nonnegativety constraints on the parameters of the GARCH (p, Q) model may be relaxed without giving up the requirement of the conditional variance remaining non- negative with probability one. This paper looks into the consequences of adopting these less severe constraints in the GARCH (2,2)...

In this paper, a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of the unconditional fourth moment of the GARCH (p, q) process is given as well as an expression for the moment itself. Furthermore, the autocorrelation function of the centred and squared observations of this process is...

Is the role of government different in poor countries? We examine the government's role for growth in 40 LDCs with low infrastructure levels and limited access to capital. We consider both expenditure and financing aspects of government activity, but cannot conclude that governments in LDCs...

Within most organizations, agents may spend time on a variety of tasks, productive and redistributive. In this paper, I derive an optimal multi-task incentive scheme under the realistic assumption that agents have limited liability. The wage level is shown to increase with an agent's discretion...