International migration is maybe the single most effective way to alleviate global poverty. When a given host country allows more immigrants in, this creates costs and benefits for that particular country as well as a positive externality for individuals and governments who care about world...

We study how net neutrality regulations affect a high-bandwidth content provider’s (CP) investment incentives in quality of services (QoS). We find that the effects crucially depend on network capacity levels. With limited capacity, as in mobile networks, prioritized delivery services are...

Recent empirical studies suggest a need for a flexible patent regime responding to industry characteristics. In practice, sector-specific modifications of patent strength already exist but lack theoretical foundation. This paper intends to make up for this neglect by scrutinizing in what...

An economy with clean and dirty intermediate inputs may fall into a trap characterized by low environmental quality and low life expectancy, while the others converge to opposite steady states. We propose new strategies towards sustainable growth. They include: (i) taxes (subsidies) imposed on...

Despite remarkable growth during the last decade, Asia and the Pacific still faces extensive basic infrastructure needs. Furthermore, to cope up with the reduced export demand from advanced economies arising out of the ongoing financial crisis, the region needs to enhance its connectivity...

It is frequently observed that the implementation of green policies is delayed compared to the initial announcement. Considering a setting with a representative monopolist extracting a non-renewable resource, we demonstrate that announcing a green policy, but then delaying its implementation, is...

Firms may underinvest in local environmental protection even from the private viewpoint of its owners and employees, but works councils may help mitigate this problem. We show that increases in environmental investments when councils are present could be employee-led, firm-led, or jointly-led....

We focus in this paper on the effects of court errors on the optimal sharing of liability between firms and financiers, as an environmental policy instrument. Using a structural model of the interactions between firms, financial institutions, governments and courts we show, through numerical...

This paper investigates the impact of the public smoking ban which came into effect in Italy on January 2005 on individual smoking behaviour. Current empirical evidence supports the existence of a negative effect of the Italian ban on smoking prevalence and consumption in the general population....

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) is a very powerful court compared to other international courts and even national courts of last resort. Observers almost unanimously agree that it is the preliminary references procedure that made the ECJ the powerful court it is today. In this paper, we...