Price formation of fish *1 An application of an inverse demand system

Inverse demand systems explain price variations as functions of quantity variations. They have properties analogous to those of regular demand systems. There are very few examples of their empirical application. In part this is due to lack of data for which price is the decision variable and the quantity given. The case of fish landed at Belgian sea ports appears to suit an inverse demand system well. A Rotterdam variant of such a system in estimated. Allais interaction intensities have been derived and show a reasonable pattern

How Competitive is the Dutch Coffee market?

World coffee bean prices have shown large fluctuations during the past years. Consumer prices for roasted coffee, in contrast, have varied considerably less. This article investigates whether the weak relationship between coffee bean and consumer prices can be explained by a lack of competition on the Dutch coffee market

Ageing and the current account; simulations for the Netherlands

The ageing baby-boom generations in the OECD economies will have an impact on the global supply and demand of capital over the next decades. The size and direction of this impact have been the subject of much research, which we survey. We study the effects of alternative interest rate paths for the Dutch economy with the IMAGE general equilibrium model, emphasizing developments of the current account. Further simulations explore the sensitivity of the outcomes to alternative demographic projections, tax smoothing and exogenous participation increases. We find that tax smoothing is not the appropriate policy to generate a more equitable intergenerational distribution when changes in the world interest rate are taken into consideration

Implications for Net Positions of the Agricultural Reform Agenda 2000

The budgetary consequences of the reform proposals in Agenda 2000 have stimulated the debate on the financial costs and benefits of EU-membership. This article analyses the implications of the proposed agricultural reform for the net contributions by simulating three scenarios. The inclusion of implicit trade subsidies is vital in the discussion on net positions. Agenda 2000 is projected to affect substantially the net positions of member states

Religion and Income

This paper tests whether the behaviour of households in different countries is homogeneous with respect to the influence of religion on income. The violation of the homogeneity assumption would have two consequences. First, results based on country studies might not be applicable to other countries. Second, one should be careful when pooling cross-country data in this type of research. Data at household level of the European and World Values Survey are pooled for 25 Western countries. We estimate simultaneously an income and a religion equation to correct for the endogeneity of religiosity. We find that estimation outcomes are different between low and high-income countries. Whereas church membership is found to have a positive effect on income for high-income countries, this effect is negative for low-income countries. This result is robust to denominational distribution, participation effects and alternative measures of religiosity

Ageing and the Relative Price of Nontradeables

In this paper we identify the effects of ageing on the relative price of nontradeables versus tradeables. We consider two cases. In a first specification, age effects only account for short-run dynamics. An alternative case allows for permanent age effects. Estimating the respective cases by means of an ECM on a panel of OECD countries we find significant effects of demographic composition on the relative prices, even after correcting for the standard explanatory variables. Simulations based on population projections of the UN show that ageing might substantially contribute to inflationary pressures in the near future

Lifetime labor supply in a search model of unemployment

This paper investigates the age-dependency of participation and unemployment by integrating job search with intertemporal optimizing behavior of finitely-lived households. We find that search frictions and tax rates distort the decisions of older workers to a much larger extent than that of young workers. This finding provides an explanation of the observed fall of participation rates of elder workers as a result of the post-war increase in tax rates and replacement rates. We show that the age pattern of search unemployment does not match observed unemployment and we propose a new concept of ‘voluntary’ unemployment that agrees well with observations

Population Ageing and Pension Reform in a Small Open Economy with Non-Traded Goods

In this paper we study the implications of population ageing in an economy with a sizeable non-traded goods sector. To this effect a highly stylized micro-founded macro model is constructed in which the age structure of the population plays a non-trivial role. The model distinguishes separate birth and death probabilities (thus allowing for net population change), allows for age-dependent labour productivity (thus mimicing life-cycle saving), and includes a rudimentary pension system (thus allowing for intergenerational redistribution). The model is used to analytically study demographic and pension shocks

The Bicausal Relation between Religion and Income

In this paper the relation between religion and income is investigated using a micro-dataset for the Netherlands. Religiosity is measured by religious membership and by participation. Instead of estimating separately a religion and an income equation, joint regression is preferred since this generally yields more efficient estimates. Following the single equation approach, both religious measures are found to decrease significantly income and income is found to affect negatively religion. However, these cross-effects get insignificant once the equations are simultaneously estimated. In contrast, the effects of socio-economic characteristics on religion and income hardly differ between both approaches

The monopolistic competition revolution in retrospect

Avinash Dixit and Joseph Stiglitz revolutionized the modelling of imperfectly competitive markets and launched "the second monopolistic competition revolution". Experts in the areas of macroeconomics, international trade theory, economic geography, and international growth theory examine the success of the second revolution in this collection of papers. They reveal what appears to be "missing" and look forward to the next step in the modelling of imperfectly competitive markets. The text includes a comprehensive survey of the two monopolistic competition revolutions, and previously unpublished working papers by Dixit and Stiglitz that led to their famous 1977 paper. Contributors: Steven Brakman, Ben J. Heijdra, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Avinash K. Dixit, Wilfred J. Ethier, J. Peter Neary, Joseph Francois, Douglas Nelson, Richard E. Baldwin, Rikard Forslid, Philippe Martin, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano, Frederic Robert-Nicoud, Jolanda J. W. Peeters, Harry Garretsen, Charles van Marrewijk, Marc Schramm, J. Vernon Henderson, Sjak Smulders, Theo van de Klundert, Henri L. F. de Groot, Marjan W. Hofkes, Peter Mulder, Russell W. Cooper, Jan Boone, Christian Keuschnigg, Leon J. H. Bettendorf