In most industrialized economies the services sector accounts for more than half the GNP. Moreover, the services sector, unlike other sectors, has grown steadily over the past two decades. The productivity of the sector, on the other hand, has remained broadly static over the comparable period....

This paper provides an economic analysis of the survey responses of visitors who were asked to make a “ value for money” (VFM) assessment of a museum visit. The paper first interprets the notion of VFM from an economic perspective, and distinguishes between evaluations made before and after...

This paper examines politicians' stated preferences on tax reforms which aim to bring about a given change in revenue. The paper starts from a simple framework inwhich politicians are vote maximisers, analyses how disequilibria may affect tax choices and considers possible asymmetries in...

In this paper, we estimate separate UK money demand functions for the household and corporate sectors; and calculate estimates of the welfare cost of inflation. We find that the household sector bears most of the welfare burden which is in sharp contrast to previous (US) evidence. Also, we find...

This article analyzes how age grouping in youth competitions and soccer education programs affects wage formation at the professional level. A simple theoretical model shows that professional players born late after the cutoff date are expected to earn systematically higher wages than their...

This paper extends the empirical literature about the effects of fiscal decentralization on the growth of government along three dimensions. It distinguishes between the effects of the level of decentralization from the way local governments finance their expenditures (common pool versus own...

Competition reduces rent extraction in private-sector firms. In this article, we empirically assess whether it similarly disciplines politicians by evaluating local-level governments' performance in Flanders. The results indicate that <italic>electoral</italic> competition -- measured via the number of parties...