For thousands of years, humans have known the value of honeybees in agriculture. Their pollination services are crucial for the mankind, the Global ecosystem and food production. The recently documented decline of the honeybee colonies in the world is alarming and may threaten the whole living...

The paper combines an economic-geography model of agglomeration and periphery with a model of species diversity and looks at optimal policies of biodiversity conservation. The subject of the paper is "natural" biodiversity, which is inevitably impaired by anthropogenic impact. Thus, the economic...

There is a widespread consensus among the most important players in developed countries (voters, politicians, producers, traditional and green interest groups and bureaucracies) that a shift towards an eco-social market economy is essential for sustainable growth. Nevertheless, market-based...

A cap on greenhouse gas emissions makes total emissions a fixed common-property resource. Population increases under a cap are therefore self-limiting: a population increase raises labor and reduces emissions per unit of labor, which lowers incomes and fertility. Because a marginal birth under a...

Asymmetric climate policies are expected to distort the level-playing field regarding international trade, singularly to the detriment of small open economies. The paper develops a flexible method that provides essential input regarding the design of offsetting measures. It builds on...

The 2008 financial crisis is the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of 1929. It has been characterised by a housing bubble in a context of rapid credit expansion, high risk-taking and exacerbated financial leverage, leading to deleveraging and credit crunch when the bubble burst....

The European Union (EU) accepted ten new member states (NMS) in 2004. These countries, mostly former socialist countries, have had to adjust their economic policies to the EU’s standards. Perhaps most difficult has proven to be fiscal policy whereby NMS must comply with the Stability and...

Social values shape policy outcomes. We examine the role of postmaterialism, a widely used concept in the social sciences, for the mix of capital and labour taxation chosen by a society. Following political scientist Inglehart, we define the degree of postmaterialism as the relative importance...

We augment a standard tax model by concerns about tax equity: people get upset when labour is taxed more heavily than capital. Even the slightest concern for tax equity invalidates the common recommendation for small open economies that capital should remain tax-exempt. This holds for exogenous...

This paper estimates the effects of tax changes on the U.K. economy. Identification is achieved by isolating the ‘exogenous’ tax policy shocks in the post-war U.K. economy using a narrative strategy as in Romer and Romer (2010). The resulting tax changes are shown to be unforecastable on the...