infonet-economy

Not available in German. The assumption that the assignment to treatments is ignorable conditional on attributes plays an important role in the applied statistic and econometric evaluation literature. Another term for it is conditional independence assumption. This paper discusses identification when there are more than two types of mutually exclusive treatments. It turns out that…

The search of optimal structures for social organizations has been an ongoing concern of management science, but reliable answers have not been given. Optimization theory has provided solutions, but these have always addressed very specific organizational problems, not the issue of overall optimality in terms of the fitness of the organization as a whole. In this paper, a new…

An eastern enlargement of the EU, from an incumbent country point of view, involves a fiscal burden from extending Union agricultural and cohesion policies to new members, coupled with potential gains as well as adjustment problems deriving from an extended customs union and a larger single market. Enlargement is controversial, because the net effect is unclear, a priori, and will…

With the decline of government-imposed trade barriers policymakers have given greater attention to the international distortions created by the practices of private firms, including cartels. We critically evaluate the techniques used in the economic literature to estimate the effects of these private practices, finding them wanting on several grounds. In contrast, many of the…