The pending enlargement of the European Monetary Union (EMU) has brought to the fore the discussion of the voting right distribution in the European Central Bank (ECB) council. We show that, in a model where labor unions internalize the inflationary consequences of wage setting, deviating from a...

This paper deals with a Niskanen type of public-procurement agency. It is shown that the procurement game should be separated into an investment game and a project game, the first game to be played before nature determines the actual realizations of benefit and costs of the project, the second...

This paper studies a model of the distribution of income under bounded needs. Utility derived from any given good reaches a bliss point at a finite consumption level of that good. On the other hand, introducing new varieties always increases utility. It is assumed that each variety is owned by a...

We test a simple model of exchange rate regime choice with data for non-OECD countries covering the period 1980-94. We find the variance of output at home and in potential target countries as well as the correlation between home and foreign real activity are powerful and robust predictors of...

In public procurement a temporal separation of award and actual contracting can frequently be observed. In this paper the authors give an explanation for this institutional setting. For incomplete procurement contracts they show that such may increase efficiency. They show that efficiency can be...

The purpose of this paper is twofold. We first develop a contractarian theory of redistribution. The existence of rules of redistribution is explained without any recourse to the risk-aversion of individuals. Hence, we depart from the standard legitimization of redistribution as fundamental...

This paper deals with double lobbying: several bureaucrats participate in joint lobbying to get a high total departmental budget, but they also engage in antagonistic lobbying to reap as high a share of the total budget as possible. The antagonistic lobbying constitutes a contest among the...

The choice of an exchange rate peg often points to a trade-off between gaining credibility and losing flexibility. We show that the flexibility loss may be reduced if domestic and foreign shocks are correlated and more volatile. Allowing for a plausible structural change after a peg, a...