This paper takes an overview over the historical paths toward the Economic and Currency Union launched in EU in the post-WWII era. Namely, it covers Snakes, European Monetary System, and establishment of the Economic and Currency Union. Moreover, the paper analyzes the uniform monetary policy...

Subject: The education in mathematics, its failure and costs, and how to redesign this market. The political economy of mathematics education. Method: We do not require statistics to show that mathematics education fails but can look at the math itself. Criticism on mathematics itself can only...

Lots of business experts have great ideas about the ways in which Web technologies can be used to enhance customer/partner relationships, increase market share, enhance competitive advantage, etc. However, many of these e-business ideas never take shape simply because it was so difficult to...

Urban water demand is rapidly growing in India due to high growth in urban population and rapid industrialization. Meeting this growing demand is a big challenge for the urban planners in India. Incidentally, urban areas in arid and semi arid regions of India are experiencing rapid growth. As a...

After having been at the helm of the international monetary system for decades, the International Monetary Fund was sidelined in policy debates in the past few years. One reason for the IMF not having taken a more central role in addressing key global policy issues in recent years relates to its...

This paper takes a closer look at the puzzle uncovered by Driesprong et al. (2008) and finds empirical support for the "oil effect" in equity returns. Using forty nine US industry-level returns series and changes in oil spot and future prices, we address whether industry-level returns are...

This paper considers a Hotelling duopoly with two firms A and B in the final good market. Both A and $B$ can produce the required intermediate good, firm B having a lower cost due to a superior technology. We compare two contracts: outsourcing (A orders the intermediate good from B) and...

We review and model the impact of the internet on the production and uptake of high- quality news. Our review of trends in the market for news suggests 3 stylized facts: i) particular quality news markets are dominated by merely a few providers, ii) demand for quality news appears stable, but...

This paper analyzes the impact of vertical integration on product quality. Contrary to previous findings, it is shown that integration decreases quality in many natural situations. In general, the direction of the quality change is governed by three effects that are isolated in the model. This...

Prior to the Asian crisis, benign liquidity conditions contributed to credit expansion and overinvestment in the East Asian economies until they were hit by a deep recession (Saxena and Wong 2002). Similarly to the developments in the tiger economies in the nineties, the CEE economies grew...