Foreign Direct Investment, Tax Competition and Social Expenditure

The aim of this paper is to make a first step towards studying the role of social expenditure and its interaction with corporate taxation in determining the destination of foreign direct investment (FDI) flows. Using panel data for 18 OECD countries and measuring the extent of social welfare policies by the (public social expenditure)/GDP ratio, we find strong support for the conjecture that redistributive social welfare state policies are valued by multinationals as, for instance, they may signal a government's commitment to social stability.Foreign Direct Investment, Tax Competition, Social Policy

Communication, Commitment, and Deception in Social Dilemmas: Experimental Evidence

Social norms of cooperation are studied under several forms of communication. In an experiment, strangers could make public statements before playing a prisoner’s dilemma. The interaction was repeated indefinitely, which generated multiple equilibria. Communication could be used as a tool to either signal intentions to coordinate on Pareto-superior outcomes, to deceive others, or to credibly commit to actions. Some forms of communication did not promote the incidence of efficient Nash play, and sometimes reduced it. Surprisingly, cooperation suffered when subjects could publicly commit to actions.coordination, cheap-talk, deception, indefinitely repeated game, social norms

Economic Arguments in U.S. Antitrust and EU Competition Policy: Two Roads Diverged

In this paper, I compare economic arguments in U.S. Supreme Court antitrust and EU Court of Justice competition policy decisions on four topics: refusal to deal, predation, vertical contracts, and hor- izontal interfirm relations.

Opportunistic competition law enforcement

We analyse the interplay between investigation policies, deterrence and desistance in a model where a competition authority monitors multiple sectors and faces a budget constraint that prevents it from deterring cartels in all sectors simultaneously. Most studies of competition law enforcement treat competition authorities as all-knowing, unwavering and benevolent. They do not behave opportunistically, do not face asymmetric information and choose their actions to optimize social welfare. In this paper, we drop one of these assumptions, and study a competition authority that can not commit to a particular investigation strategy. As a consequence, a competition authority’s decisions to investigate will be driven by the (ex-post) desistance effect instead of the (ex ante) deterrence effect of an investigation policy. The resulting opportunistic behaviour may lead to a suboptimal investigation strategy. We find that, in the absence of commitment, developing a sector specific reward scheme based on the number of captured cartels can improve welfare.

Concurrentie, innovatie en intellectuele eigendomsrechten in software markten

This study analyzes under which circumstances it may be desirable for the government to stimulate open source software as a response to market failures in software markets. To consider whether policy intervention can increase dynamic efficiency, we discuss the differences between proprietary software and open source software with respect to the incentives to innovate and market failures that may occur. The document proposes guidelines to determine which types of policy intervention may be suitable. Our most important finding is that directly stimulating open source software, e.g. by acting as a lead customer, can improve dynamic efficiency if (i) there is a serious customer lock-in problem, while (ii) to develop the software, there is no need to purchase specific, complementary inputs at a substantial cost, and (iii) follow-on innovations are socially valuable but there are impediments to contractual agreements between developers that aim at realizing such innovations. This publication is in Dutch.

Job competition, product market competition and welfare

This paper presents a model of labour supply determination under job competition. In the presence of a positive rate of unemployment and increasing returns to labour, the level of labour supply chosen by each individual lies above the one that, at the offered wage, maximises utility. There is a unique strictly positive degree of job competition that is consistent with the optimal allocation. If labour supply is upward-sloping, increasing job competition raises the equilibrium level of activity and, when job competition causes production to exceed its optimal level, reducing output market competition leads to a welfare improvement.labour supply, job competition, welfare, product market competition

Genetic testing, income distribution and insurance markets, CHERE Working Paper 2006/3

This paper analyses the policy implications for health insurance markets of the development of genetic testing. A central issue surrounding this development is whether insurers should be allowed access to the information provided by such tests. The paper first shows that on efficiency grounds alone, insurance buyers should be allowed voluntarily to supply this information to insurers. The source of the considerable opposition to this proposal is really the distributional implications: those with the worst genetic endowments will as a result have to pay the highest insurance premiums. The paper then goes on to analyse possible redistributional policies that can remedy this. In doing so, it makes a significant departure from the mainstream literature on adverse selection in insurance markets, by assuming that individuals have differing income endowments.health insurance, genetic testing

EU Enlargement, Migration and the New Constitution

The paper deals with the effects of migration resulting from EU Eastern enlargement on the welfare states of Western Europe. Although migration is good in principle, as it yields gains from trade and specialization for all countries involved, it does so only if it meets with flexible labour markets and if it is not artificially induced by gifts from the welfare state. This is not the present state of affairs in Western Europe. In addition to measures that make labour markets more flexible, the introduction of delayed integration of working migrants and the home country principle for non-working migrants is a rational reaction of the state. The proposed new EU constitution which contains far-reaching rules for a European social union should be amended accordingly.EU enlargement, migration, EU constitution, social union