Following an abrupt fall in carbon credit prices, 2012 has witnessed a disinterest on behalf of investors in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). In this paper, we aim to take a step back and provide an assessment of the CDM through a careful analysis of 6 instrument evaluation criteria. Our...

This paper investigates the importance and scope of legal and administrative barriers In Belgium as compared to its main trade partners within the framework of the recent Bolkestein directive proposal. After a short review of the literature on the impacts of economic deregulation on...

Each new crisis comes with financial innovations being pointed as scapegoats. But innovations are in general new tools materialising around existing strategies to make them more available and measurable. Their pace of evolution paired with that of the complexity of the interconnectedness between...

In the North of Europe, club membership is higher than in the South, but the frequency of contacts with friends, relatives and neighbors is lower. We link this fact to another one: the low geographical mobility rates in the South of Europe relative to the North.To interpret these facts, we build...

This article provides an analysis of recent progress achieved in two areas of European policy relevant for cross-border savings: banking union and taxation. The creation of a banking union is still in progress but some of its instruments have a limited size and their implementation will require...

In this paper, we propose a new model with random variance components for estimating small area characteristics. Under the proposed model, we derive the empirical best linear unbiased estimator, an approximation to terms of order o(1/ m) and an estimator whose bias is of order o(1/ m) for its...

This paper adds to the growing empirical evidence on the importance of habits in governing human behavior, and sheds new light on individual inertia in relation to transportation behavior. An enriched perspective rooted in Veblenian evolutionary economics (VEE) is used to construct a theoretical...

This paper estimates the impact of loan officer subjectivity on microcredit granting by exploiting an exceptionally detailed database from a Brazilian microfinance institution. The loan officers collect field data, meet with applicants, and make recommendations to the credit committee, which has...

Linear models with stable error densities are considered, and their local asymptotic normality with respect to the regression parameter is established. We use this result, combined with Le Cam's third lemma, to obtain local powers and asymptotic relative efficiencies for various classical rank...