Vol. 2 (2016): Research in Business and Economics

Letter from the editor

The Marble (Maastricht Researched Based Learning for Excellence) programme at SBE facilitates the development of research projects for highly motivated and excellent undergraduate students. Students attending the bachelor programme of Economics and International Business can join the Marble programme in the third year of their study. During the third year they perform a short research which deals with their specialization or major. The findings are presented at a mini symposium in December or June and documented in a research paper.

This series contains the best research papers in the academic year 2014/15 and are a representation of the different types of research in the bachelor programmes. Niels Mourmans specialized in Fiscal Economics. His paper uses panel data from 34 OECD countries over the period 1981-2014 to find out what the determinants of corporate income tax rates are. It is found that strategic fiscal interactions between countries are the main driver of corporate tax rate setting behavior by countries. The quality of his research became also recognized at the Marble symposium where he won the best poster award. He continues his career in research, as he takes the research master at SBE. Hannes Titeca specialized in economics. He applied regression utilising an existing categorisation of the predominately high-income countries of the OECD in 2009. It is found that more public insurance and less private insurance is associated with significantly lower spending after controlling for differences in income through GDP and healthcare quality/outcomes through life expectancy. He hopes to start a PhD in September 2016. Caroline Fosdike studied Economics. Spanning the period 1979-2012, her paper analysed the viability of a monetary union between nine Union of South American Nations members from a generalised purchasing power parity (G-PPP) perspective. Lise Devits, attended the Marketing major, ran an experiment to test whether a complex logo and a simple logo had different effects on consumption. Kenneth Venmans attempted to find a relationship between management earnings forecasts and executive compensation contracts. Three relations were analysed through both logistic and linear regressions using a sample of 90 U.S. listed companies between 2006 and 2012. Michelle Amory, majoring in Finance did an empirical study in the relation between cultural values and excess return of sin stocks using DataStream.

Jan Nijhuis

Maastricht, June 2016