Increasing penalty structures for repeat offenses are ubiquitous in penal codes, despite little empirical or theoretical support. Multi-period models of criminal enforcement based on the standard economic approach of Becker (1968) generally find that the optimal penalty structure is either flat...

Under contingent fees the attorney gets a share of the judgement; under conditional fees the lawyer gets an upscale premium if the case is won which is, however, unrelated to the adjudicated amount. We compare conditional and contingent fees in a framework where lawyers are uninformed about the...

Under contingent fees the attorney gets a share of the judgement; under conditional fees they get an upscale premium if the case is won, which is, however, unrelated to the adjudicated amount. We compare conditional and contingent fees in a framework where lawyers choose between a safe and a...

It is often alleged that PTAs involving the EC and the US include a significant number of obligations in areas not currently covered by the WTO Agreement, such as investment protection, competition policy, labour standards and environmental protection. The primary purpose of this study is...

While environmental and labour issues are not new to the GATT, nor to other trade policy fora, they are likely to have a more prominent role in trade policy discussions in the years ahead for the newly formed World Trade Organization (WTO). Many developing countries perceive the entwining of...

The international financial system has been the subject of much debate following the financial crises of the 1990s. While many reforms have been proposed for and implemented by mostly developing countries, few changes have been made to the international financial system itself. Fundamentally,...

The US Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulation mandates, subject to a civil penalty, producers to achieve a certain fleet average fuel economy on sales of new passenger cars. Analysing the incentive effects of CAFE, we find that it affords differential tax treatment to car models with...

A new round of WTO negotiations on agriculture, services and perhaps some other issues is expected to be launched in late 1999. To what extent should those negotiations include so-called "new trade agenda" items aimed at ensuring that domestic regulatory policies do not discriminate against...

The potential welfare gains from further liberalizing agricultural markets are huge, both absolutely and relative to gains from liberalizing textiles or other manufacturing, according to recent GTAP modelling results. Should attempts to liberalize farm trade in the next WTO round follow the same...

We provide a simple but novel model of trade agreements that highlights the role of transaction costs, renegotiation and dispute settlement. The model allows us to characterize the appropriate remedy for breach and whether the agreement should be structured as a system of "property rights" or...