The Tax Treatment of Interest Expenditures of Multinational Enterprises

This paper analyses the national tax treatment of interest expenditures of multinational enterprises in a non- cooperative world. It is shown that the international tax system generally leads to distortions in the capital decisions of multinational firms. In contrast to the existing literature on the tax treatment of the expenditures of multinationals, it is found that the form and size of distortions can differ per country depending on the stake a country has in the multinational. Furthermore, internationalisation of the firm's operations and ownership is demonstrated to lead to less generous interest deduction rules of individual countries and in the limit may result in no deduction allowance at all

How Polarization and Political Instability affect Learning through Experimentation

In a multiperiod setting, decision-makers can learn about the consequences of their decisions through experimentation. In this paper we examine how in a two-party system polarization and political instability affect learning through experimentation. We distinguish two cases: the decision to be made is not salient and does not affect the outcome of the following elections (exogenous elections) and the decision is salient and the election outcome depends on it (endogenous elections). We show that while the possibility of learning increases activism, the existence of political instability distorts learning. Furthermore, in contrast to the existing literature, we demonstrate that, when elections are exogenous, polarization between political parties does not always decrease active learning. In the case with endogenous elections we find that electoral concerns may induce candidates not to experiment, even if the majority of voters prefers activism

Best living concepts for elderly homeowners: combining a stated choice experiment with architectural design

In this paper we combine the insights from social sciences and architecture to design best living concepts for a specific target group, elderly homeowners. We perform a stated choice experiment to study residential preferences of this group and translate the results into an architectural design of senior‐friendly housing. This methodological approach is novel to the literature. We derive the willingness‐to‐pay for different residential attributes and show how these attributes can be traded off against each other to create best living concepts. We discuss how these concepts can be translated into customized architectural design while making use of standard architectural elements

Grote data en de economie van de vastgoedmarkten

In juni 2016 ben ik als universitair docent en opvolger van Jos Smeets begonnen bij de leerstoel Real Estate Management and Development (REMD) van de TU/e. Hiervoor heb ik dertien jaar bij het Centraal Planbureau gewerkt. Ik ben econoom en mijn onderzoek heeft altijd een sterke binding gehad met de praktijk. Ik geloof erin dat nieuwe bruikbare inzichten ontstaan door een kruisbestuiving tussen state-of-the-art empirische technieken, goede data en intuïtie en kennis van deskundigen

Winkels omzetten in woningen: kansen liggen aan de rand van een winkelgebied

Door de opkomst van online retail neemt de vraag naar fysieke winkels af en staan er ondanks de goed draaiende economie nog veel winkels leeg. Tegelijkertijd is er een grote vraag naar woningen. De twee problemen zouden in één klap kunnen worden aangepakt met de omzetting van lege winkels in woningen

Residential sorting by education level enhances the return on investments in transport infrastructure

Concerns are often raised about increasing spatial segregation by education level in societies. This column uses a study in the Netherlands to show that as preferences for locally provided public goods with a high fixed cost, such as train stations, differ widely between educational groups, spatial sorting by education and an increase in local density can actually raise the social benefits from investments in such infrastructure. However, since the highly educated benefit disproportionally, this leads to serious political economy problems

Environmental Policy Choice under Uncertainty

Market-based instruments are believed to create more efficient incentives for firms to adopt new technologies than command-and-control policies. We compare the effects of a direct technology regulation and of an adoption subsidy under asymmetric information about the costs of technological advances in pollution control. We show that the policy maker may want to commit to her policy. The reason is that uncertainty about adoption costs induces the policy maker to set subsidy levels that increase over time; firms, expecting higher subsidies in the future, postpone investment. Direct regulation offers a commitment possibility that allows to prevent firms from postponing investment

The Optimal Degree of Polarization

In the literature on electoral politics full convergence of policy platforms is usually regarded as socially optimal. The reason is that risk-averse voters prefer a sure middle-of-the-road policy to a lottery of two extremes with the same expectation. In this paper we study the normative implications of convergence in a simple model of electoral competition, in which parties are uncertain about voters' preferences. We show that if political parties have incomplete information about voters' preferences, the voters may prefer some degree of policy divergence. The intuition is that policy divergence enables voters to correct policies that are based on a wrong perception of their desires