Over the course of the past few years, too much credit has been made available worldwide, due to financial innovation, overly optimistic expectations and loophole-ridden regulation. Regulatory supervisors have failed because they were unable to prevent this situation. Things took a bad turn...

This paper has two aims. First, it describes CPB's contribution on bilateral services trade data to version 7 of the GTAP database. Among others, it uses reliability indices to determine the quality of the data reported by exporting and importing countries. Second, this paper discusses briefly...

This memorandum presents some basic equalities and inequalities about rates of return in discrete time, without auto-correlation. The arithmetic and geometric means are discussed. Estimation of the expected payout and the median payout is discussed, including maximum likelihood estimation.

Innovation is a policy area in which the European Union (EU) has the competence to support, coordinate and supplement Member States policies according to the new Lisbon Treaty (2007). The Member States (MS) have the primacy in this area and the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality...

This study analyses macro wage elasticities on labour productivity, payroll taxes, average and marginal income tax, consumer and producer prices, the replacement ratio and the unemployment rate. The data have been analyzed in a meta analysis that relates differences in each elasticity of pay...

In this memorandum the optimal capacity of Combined Heat and Power (CHP) is derived, using a simple model with an analytical solution. The solution is expressed as the fraction of the time during which the heat demand exceeds the optimal CHP heat production capacity.

A shortage of teachers in primary and secondary schools in the Netherlands is expected in the near future as a large part of the current workforce will retire. Recently, the Dutch government has decided to increase wages of teachers. This paper qualitatively assesses the impact of three...

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) flows have increased substantially in the past two decades. These developments have motivated the appearance of a large number of empirical papers that test the expected benefits that FDI inflows are assumed to bring to the host countries. We survey the recent...

One of the achievements of the of the European Union (EU) is the free movement of goods, services, capital and labour between the member states. The internal market for goods seems to function well, after the implementation of the Single Market programme in 1988. That is however not the case for...

The total pension premium rate consists of two components, the contribution rate and the catching-up premium rate. The contribution rate finances the accrual of pension rights while the catching-up premium finances (possible) wealth deficits of a pension fund. The contribution rate and the...