With the extension of its competence for social policy legislation in the Maastricht and Amsterdam treaties, the EU has adopted a significantly new social dimension in the past ten years. According to the Copenhagen criteria, the CEEC candidate countries have to adopt the former via the acquis...

In a baseline micro model a band of inaction due to hiring- and firing-costs is widened by option value effects of exchange rate uncertainty. Based on this micro foundation an aggregation approach is presented. Under uncertainty, intervals of weak response to exchange rate reversals (called...

Policymakers in the EU member states are currently shaping rescue packages to prevent the financial crisis hitting their economies with unmitigated force. Each government is responding to the emerging problems with a country-specific set of measures. Given the global nature of the crisis, would...

This article discusses the effects of taxation on the discrete choice of alternative projects. In particular, it is shown that if taxation affects the optimal timing of irreversible investment, then the discrete choice is distorted as well. This result has both methodological and political...

Macroeconomic shocks and labour-market institutions jointly determine employment growth and economic performance. The effect of shocks depends on the nature of these intitutions and the effect of institutional change depends on the macroeconomic environment. It follows that a given set of...

In this paper we analyse the employment implications of firing restrictions. We find that when a recession is expected and the trend rate of productivity growth is small, a rise in firing costs affects mainly the hiring decision. Thus there is a negative effect on average employment. When, on...

This paper uses the Bad News Principle to study how the ability of multinationals to shift profits by transfer pricing affects both the timing of foreign direct investment decisions and government tax policy. A main finding of the paper is that if countries compete to attract foreign direct...

This paper addresses the issue of how regulatory constraints affect firm s investment choices when the firm has an option to delay investment. The RPI-x rule is compared to a profit sharing rule, which increases the x factor in case profits go beyond a given level. It is shown that a pure price...

In this article we analyse the effects of different regulatory schemes (price cap and profit sharing) on a firm s investment of endogenous size. Using a real option approach in continuous time, we show that profit sharing does not affect a firm s start-up decision relative to a pure price cap...

This article discusses the effects of an asymmetric tax scheme on incremental and sequential investment strategies. The tax base is equal to the firm s return, net of an imputation rate. When the firm s return is less than this rate, however, no tax refunds are allowed. This scheme is neutral...