The European Union has introduced a “two foreign languages policy” with little solid knowledge of the consequences. I attempt in this paper to provide some facts for a serious discussion of language policy. In the first part of the paper, I look at the European languages on a world scale,...

Most workers are only partially insured against unemployment. One reason is that high unemployment compensation creates a free rider problem when monitoring of job search behavior is limited; people who do not seek employment (non-workers) may nevertheless collect unemployment compensation. We...

The aim of this paper is to use inequality restrictions on the parameters of a structural model to find bounds on impulse response functions which are valid for any structural representation satisfying those restrictions. Economic theories specify signs and bounds of the coefficients which are...

This paper considers railway operations in 23 European countries during 1995-2001, where a series of reform initiatives were launched by the European Commission, and analyses whether these reform initiatives improved the operating efficiency of the railways. Efficiency is measured using...

An effectivity function assigns to each coalition of individuals in a society a family of subsets of alternatives such that the coalition can force the outcome of society’s choice to be a member of each of the subsets separately. A representation of an effectivity function is a game form with...

Adaptive contracting is defined as a strategy in which a principal experiments - through trial-and-error - with the degree of contractual completeness. We highlight two potential benefits of an adaptive approach: First, the implied delegation of authority can be beneficial for the principal even...

This paper analyzes how different economic characteristics at the individual, household and community level affect the risk of victimization, controlling for the impact of (non-economic) sociological factors. We use a nation wide household survey from Mozambique and show that the probability of...

Wives are typically younger than their husbands and women typically live longer than men. These two facts mean that for a typical married couple, wives have more incentive to save for old age than do husbands. This paper presents a theoretical model of the determination of household saving and...

This paper develops and compares two theories of strategic behavior of professional forecasters. The first theory posits that forecasters compete in a forecasting contest with pre-specified rules. In equilibrium of a winner-take-all contest, forecasts are excessively differentiated. According to...

This paper presents a closed form solution for time-consistent taxation and public spending in a dynamic game between government and median voter. Extending Meltzer and Richard’s static analysis of government size the paper offers a theory of growth of government. At low stages of economic...