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In this paper a New Economic Geography type wage equation is estimated for the EU‐25. The determinants of manufacturing wages are shown to be sector‐specific and the role of geography is limited. As a consequence, we show that the improvement of the EU's internal market and the evolution of European geography are likely to favour larger EU members and challenge smaller ones.

Most EU‐15 countries have kept restrictions to migration from the new member countries but committed to removing them within seven years from the 2004 enlargement. This article predicts the sectoral trade and real wage impact on high‐income, mid‐income, and low‐income members of removing those restrictions, given two extreme scenarios: either all migrants are skilled or all are unskilled. The main effect of skilled migration is the relocation of high‐scale economy, skill‐intensive industries from mid‐income into high‐income countries. The main effect of unskilled migration is the relocation of low‐scale economy, low skill‐intensive industries from low‐income into mid‐income countries. Both high‐income and low‐income members would be better off with skilled migration, but those with mid‐income would benefit from unskilled migration. (JEL F1, F15, F22, J31, L6)

This paper examines and compares households' willingness to accept (WTA)/willingness to pay (WTP) ratio for solar power equipment on their premises through both a novel experimental approach and conventional techniques. The experimental approach was administered by using a Becker-DeGroot-Marschak method and cheap talk, with open-ended questions of WTA/WTP. The results were quite striking. The ratio for the incentivised approach was 1.08:1; whereas for the conventional approach it was 3.5:1. The findings suggest that the hypothesis that WTP equals WTA cannot be rejected for the incentivised mechanism, and it appears to control for the individual's strategic behaviour bias as a treatment against over-estimating WTA and under-estimating WTP. The findings also provide some policy implications for Northern Cyprus: the government can set lower financial incentives to increase the solar power installed capacity on the island.

© 2016, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. This paper investigates the effects of institutional changes within the UK housing market in recent decades using structural break tests and time-varying parameter models. This approach is motivated by models of institutional change drawn from the political science literature which focus on the existence of both fast-moving and slow-moving institutional changes and the interactions between them as drivers of the dynamics of asset prices. As a methodological contribution, we use several time-varying parameter models for the first time in investigations of institutional change. Our findings support the existence of both structural breaks and continuous variance in parameters. This contributes to our understanding of the housing market in two respects. Firstly, the dates of structural breaks appear to better match unexpected market shocks rather than remarkable political events, and this supports prior institutional theory. Secondly, assessment of the effect of slow-moving institutional changes shows that people's biased expectations rather than the economic fundamentals have increasingly played an important role in driving housing prices in the short run although fundamentals continue to drive house prices to converge to their long-run equilibrium.

Test de validité des stratégies de réponses aux risques terrifiants Cet article rapporte les résultats d'un test de validité d'une procédure développé pour explorer l'impact du contexte et des risques de base sur le taux de substitution marginal des individus entre richesse et risque de mortalité à travers différents contextes, en utilisant une méthodologie de risk-risk trade-off. L'analyse de ces interviews qualitatifs montre que l'effet du contexte est différent pour différents individus. Pour quelques individus le contexte n'avait presque aucun effet, ces individus se focalisant principalement sur leurs risques de base, tandis que pour d'autres il avait un effet considérable sur leur trade-off entre les risques. Notamment, seule une minorité décrivait une stratégie cohérente avec la maximisation de l'utilité espérée. Ceci a des implications importantes sur l'utilisation des mesures de risk-risk trade-off et des consentements-à-payer pour la réduction de mortalité dans les analyses coût-bénéfice.