Traditional analyses of standards in international trade identify standards as government regulations and investigate the potential for distortion of trade flows. In reality, however, private industry groups exercise critical influence on the determination of technical standards. The composition...

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...

This paper examines the role of liability for past environmental contamination in the privatization processes of Central and Eastern Europe. The theoretical section establishes a link between a risk-averse investor’s amount of information regarding the extent of past environmental...

Because standards and regulations respond to a society's demand for specific public goods, we expect them to be shaped by preferences, endowments, technologies - the fundamental determinants of this demand. There is no a priori reason why standards should be equal in different societies. This...

The objective of this paper is to develop an analytical framework for estimation of the parameters of a structural model of an incentive contract under moral hazard, taking into account agents heterogeneity in preferences. We show that allowing the principal to strategically distribute the...

Plurilateral agreements in the WTO context allow sub-sets of countries to agree to commitments in specific policy areas that only apply to signatories, and thus allow for ‘variable geometry’ in the WTO. Current WTO rules make it much more difficult to pursue the plurilateral route than to...

This Paper analyses the welfare effects of price restrictions on private contracting in a world where agents have a limited cognitive ability. People compute the costs and benefits of entering a transaction with an error. The government knows the distribution of true costs and benefits as well...

We model a South African city during Apartheid (in which both schooling and mobility are restricted on the basis of race) and after Apartheid (in which no restrictions are imposed). We first show that the inequality between blacks and whites decreases when Apartheid laws are removed. Indeed,...

We develop different spatial search models in which a land market is embedded into a standard search matching framework. The link between the land and the labour market is realized through the average search intensity of unemployed workers. We first develop a simple model where search intensity...

We evaluate the role that cities play on individual productivity in China. First, we show that location explains a large share of nominal wage disparities. Second, even after controlling for individual and firms characteristics and instrumenting city characteristics, the estimated elasticity of...