"EMU and Enlargement: A Review of Policy Issues"

This report is the final output of the study "Economic and Monetary Union and Enlargement" commissioned by the Directorate-General for Research of the European Parliament in May 1999. An Interim Report was provided in September 1999. The report reviews the mains policy issues concerning the accession of 10 Central and Eastern European Countries, and Cyprus and Malta, and the interaction with their parallel integration into the Economic and Monetary Union.Euro, Enlargement, Transition Economies, Exchange Rate Regimes, Monetary Policies, DIT.

Lump Sum Moving Cost and Aggregate Office Space Use

When firms decide to change office space use, in many instances this involves relocation. Relocation involves sizablecosts to the firm that can to a large extent be characterized as lump sum, i.e. independent of the change in demand. Inthis paper we propose and solve a model of the demand for office space with lump sum adjustment costs at the firm level.The optimal policy for a firm is a so-called control band policy, or (s,S)-rule: leave office space use unchanged until thedifference between actual office space use and desired office space use exceeds a certain threshold. Desired office spaceuse is defined as the office space use that would result if no frictions were present and conforms to a model were actualoffice space depends only on relevant current state variables. Next we go on to investigate the aggregate implications ofthis lumpy microeconomic behaviour using a stochastic aggregation framework of Bertola and Caballero (1994).The lumpy behaviour at the firm level implies that aggregate demand for office space is a time-varying weighted averageof the current and lagged state of the economy. Only a fraction of aggregate demand depends on the current state of theeconomy. Furthermore, the magnitude of this fraction also depends on the current state of the economy. We use ourmodel on office space market data for The Netherlands. We find that desired office space use is more volatile than actualoffice space use and does not track actual office space use very well. Aggregate office space implied by our model tracksactual office space use much closer, indicating that the gap between theoretical desired office space use and actual officespace use can be accounted for by lumpy adjustment at the firm level.

Schaalsprong Almere: een kosten-baten-analyse

Stedelijk schoon en een metropolitane uitstraling zijn voorbeelden van de hoge verwachtingen die bestuurders hebben van verstedelijkingsbeleid. Deze effecten zijn veelal lastig te meten en in geld uit te drukken. Het Centraal Plan Bureau en Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving laten echter voor de Schaalsprong Almere zien dat de maatschappelijke kosten-batenanalyse als instrument om verstedelijkingsprojecten te analyseren veel verder reikt dan vaak wordt gedacht. Ook blijkt de synergie tussen openbaar vervoerinvesteringen en verstedelijking in verhouding tot de investeringskosten beperkt

Should Benefit-Cost Analysis Include a Correction for the Marginal Excess Burden of Taxation?

AbstractThis paper provides an overview of theoretical, empirical, and practical arguments in favor of or against a correction for the marginal excess burden of taxation (MEB). Benefit-cost analysis (BCA) should be used to compare the costs and benefits of a policy measure and its major alternatives, and whenever relevant, also to compare different ways of financing this. The best pragmatic approach is then to assume first that a policy measure is financed out of general tax revenues and then that the MEB of these taxes is broadly counterbalanced by the benefits of redistribution of these taxes. The latter assumption is consistent with the preferences for equality in a country’s current tax system. It is a simple and politically neutral assumption, and it implies that the marginal cost of public funds is equal to 1 and that no correction is needed in BCAs for the MEB. This shortcut assumption does not imply that the tax system is optimal or that BCAs should be distributionally weighted. Choosing an alternative source of financing, i.e., other than general tax revenues, should be regarded as a separate policy measure that should be analyzed separately in a BCA, including its distortionary and distributive effects.</jats:p

Verantwoording, Behorend bij Economische Effecten van CO2-Beprijzing: Varianten Vergeleken

CPB en PBL publiceerden op 7 juni de Policy Brief ‘Economische effecten van CO2-beprijzing: varianten vergeleken’. Dit achtergronddocument (AD) bevat een beschrijving van de gemaakte keuzes in de Policy Brief. Dat betreft de gekozen varianten en hoe het model Worldscan (WS) is gebruikt. In hoofdstuk 2 gaan we in op bestaande heffingen en hoe de daaruit volgende effectieve CO2 prijzen zijn af te leiden. Ook laten we zien hoe deze heffingen zich verhouden tot schades. Dat is de basis voor de keuze van de beprijzingsvarianten in hoofdstuk 3. Daar gaan we ook in op de manier waarop WS is gebruikt. In hoofdstuk 4 presenteren we de gedetailleerde uitkomsten van de geanalyseerde varianten en leggen we deze uit