There is a general misconception on the impact of marginal tax rates. Following the hypothesis of optimising economic agents, it is proper that marginal rates enter the discussion. The only issue is that the margin mu= st be computed correctly. In dynamics, one must take account of the fact tha=...

Travel time losses in the Netherlands are likely to get worse in the years ahead if capacity is not added to cope with the demand. This particularly creates problems for business travel, which is characterized by a high “value of time”. In the Netherlands, policy makers have a long-standing...

Icelandic university teachers, the Ministry of Finance and the University of Iceland have been conducting an interesting experiment by changing the form of remuneration of university teachers in a fundamental way. This paper accounts for the development of university teachers salaries the last...

This paper deals with the optimality of teacher incentive contracts in the presence of costly or limited government resources. It considers educational production under asymmetric information as a function of teacher effort and class size. In the presence of costly government resources and...

To avoid the extremely high profit levels found in recent experiences with price cap regulation, some regulators have proposed a profit- sharing mechanism that revises prices to the benefit of consumers. This paper investigates the conditions under which a regulator can implement such a...

Agency costs are a cost of production, and firms that do a better job of minimizing these costs should exhibit better performance. This paper tests this hypothesis by calculating the performance elasticity of average employee hourly compensation for U.S. manufacturing firms. This elasticity...

To avoid the extremely high profit levels found in recent experiences with price cap regulation, some regulators have proposed a profit-sharing mechanism that revises prices to the benefit of consumers. This paper investigates the conditions under which a regulator can implement such a...

The existing debate about policies designed to foster the development of a stakeholder economy have largely avoided a fundamental question. How large is the financial stake employees currently hold in their companies? This paper addresses this question using data from the Datastream database,...

This paper evaluates the intensity of the value-maximization incentives for average employees generated through wage, salary, and bonus mechanisms. This is accomplished through estimation of the elasticity of average employee hourly compensation with respect to changes in firm performance. This...

The resolution of a conflict often has an impact which extends beyond the remits of the parties directly involved in the confrontation (e.g. labour negotiations in sectors of public interest, where a strike would impact on the public at large). Once this is recognised, models addressing...