"It’s the economy, stupid." Back in the 1992 campaign, that one line told us that Bill Clinton did not intend to be a great foreign policy president. As his second term ends, most pundits agree that this is one promise he has kept. Critics on the right argue that he is too eager to accommodate a rising China, too blind to Russia’s corruption and cronyism, and too slow to use force against state...

FOREWORD Europe Economics is an independent economics consultancy, specialising in economic regulation, competition policy and the application of economics to public policy and business issues. Most output is either private to clients, or published (a list of current published reports is available at: www.europe-economics.com). Europe Economics Staff Working Papers are intended to provide a com...

Gould and Fernandez (1989) developed a widely used operationalization of brokerage for one-mode networks. The basic idea of brokerage is that the central actor or ‘broker’ benefits from spanning the gap (or structural hole) between two disconnected parties. However, it is not always advantageous to limit the systems studied to only one mode. We develop an operationalization of two-mode brokerag...

We analyze a periodic-review inventory model where the decision maker can buy from either of two suppliers. With the first supplier, the buyer incurs a high variable cost but negligible fixed cost; with the second supplier, the buyer incurs a lower variable cost but a substantial fixed cost. Consequently, ordering costs are piecewise linear and concave. We show that a reduced form of generalize...

The history of monetary policy in Iran, judging by their performance in keeping the value of the currency, maintaining a steady growth in the Gross Domestic Product, faltering investment, show that monetary policy has not been a portrait of consistent successes, to say the least. As a result of the recent studies two rules have emerged as guideline for policy makers: Taylor rule and McCallum ru...