Does international tax competition in the environmental field lead to undesirably low levels of environmental regulation and to unacceptable standards of environmental quality? The paper attempts to answer this question in a non-competitive partial-equilibrium framework. There is one firm that...

Environmental and tax policies and the optimal provision of clean and dirty public goods are analysed within the context of a second-best framework of optimal taxation. Households consume both clean and dirty commodities. Degradation of the natural environment occurs due to the consumption of...

We discuss the quota system by which Iceland’s fisheries have been managed since 1984, and explore its implications for economic efficiency as well as fairness. We argue that the shortcomings of the Icelandic quota system are inherent in any type of quota system applied to high-seas fishing....

In this paper I analyse the incentives for governments and producers to act strategically in imperfectly competitive markets when there is Bertrand competition. Strategic behaviour by governments takes the form of distortions to their environmental policy from the first-best rule of equating...

In many markets governments set minimum quality standards while some sellers choose to compete on the basis of quality by exceeding them. Such ‘high-quality’ strategies often win public acclaim, especially when ‘environmental friendliness’ is the dimension along which firms are...

Quarantine policy reviews are becoming more sophisticated following the Uruguay Round’s Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Measures and, in Australia’s case, following also the 1996 Nairn Report. Yet they still focus primarily on the effects of restrictions just on...

This paper proposes a new approach for modeling investor fear after rare disasters. The key element is to take into account that investors' information about fundamentals driving rare downward jumps in the dividend process is not perfect. Bayesian learning implies that beliefs about the...

We develop a model of portfolio choice to nest the views of Keynes - who advocates concentration in a few familiar assets - and Markowitz - who advocates diversification across assets. We rely on the concepts of ambiguity and ambiguity aversion to formalize the idea of an investor’s...

This paper presents experimental evidence that when individuals are about to make a given decision under risk, they are willing to pay for information on the likelihood that this decision is ex-post optimal, even if this information will not affect their decision. Our findings suggest that this...