Empirical surveys find no significant impact of environmental regulation and environmental costs on international competitiveness. In the literature, we can find three hypotheses on the impact of environmental regulation. For the industrial-flight and pollution-haven hypothesis, there is no...

Environmental policy instruments have an impact on the incentives to invest in environmental R&D and this link should deserve careful consideration when introducing new instruments. Some authors argue that environmental taxes and tradable permits have rather comparable impacts on environmental...

In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (CSD, 1942), Schumpeter presents his paradoxical thesis that capitalism will destroy its own foundation, not by failure but by its success. He argues that the emergence of unfavourable circumstances will activate strong opposition from social critics and...

Starting from CO2 emissions data collected during both the production phase and during the lifetime of cars and trucks, we argue that impressive opportunities to reduce emissions can be found in the consumption phase. It is however obvious that energy taxes alone will not lead to a strong...

Understanding demand for state regulation is a foundational issue for social science. To account for this demand, existing theories rooted in market failure and government failure have focused on various forms of trust, but have paid little attention to fear. We test how fear and trust shape...

We examine the deep roots of preferences for vaccination against COVID-19, moving beyond proximate factors which can only account for part of the observable heterogeneity in the willingness to get vaccinated. Our model on experience-based learning predicts that exposure to past disruptive crises...

We develop an income shock classification taxonomy that classifies income changes into 9 categories based on the magnitude, direction and permamency of the income change. Using 01/2017 - 06/2022 bank transaction data of Belgian employees and workers, we apply this classification on labour income...

We employ proprietary data from a large bank to analyze how – during crisis – deposit insurance affects depositor behavior. Our focus is on Belgium where the government increased explicit deposit insurance coverage and implemented implicit deposit insurance arrangements. Estimating sorting...

This study analyzes the dynamic effect of FDI on local firms' productivity by relaxing the standard implicit assumption that technological spillovers are immediate and pfirmanent. We find that the entry of majority foreign owned firms has a short run negative effect on the productivity of local...