We wish to study optimal dynamic nonlinear income taxes. Do real world taxes share some of their features? What policy prescriptions can be made? We study a two period model, where the consumers and government each have separate budget constraints in the two periods, so income cannot be...

For groups that must make several decisions of similar form, we define a simple and general mechanism that is designed to promote social efficiency. The mechanism links the various decisions by forcing agents to budget their representations of preferences so that the frequency of preferences...

In economics, where the long resistance to reflecting on the effects of social interaction on economic behaviour is slowly waning, the concept of social capital may turn out to be a useful analytical tool. However, initial interest in social capital has produced a large variety of definitions,...

The “first wave” of donor sponsored anti-corruption programmes usefully focused on elaborating recommendations for parliamentarians or tried to train them (develop human capital) in anti-corruption. Now it time for these programmes to take into account parliamentarian incentives to adopt...

Monetary incentives are one approach for increasing response rates in contingent valuation surveys. We present the results of a case study desgined to assess the effect of incentives on response rates and respondent behavior. We compare response rates and quality of answers for five incentive...

Two recent studies have shown that “cheap talk” is an effective means of eliminating positive hypothetical bias in experimental and field-auction settings. We further investigate the ability of cheap talk to mitigate positive hypothetical bias in a CVM phone survey administered to over 4,000...

Under the Spanish conservation law, compensation is envisaged for the damage associated with all actions that reduce the quantity or quality of protected areas and species. This paper provides a tool to evaluate the monetary equivalent of this damage. First, we conduct a contingent valuation...

This paper examines the influence of implicit information associated with the occurrence of avalanches on willingness to pay (WTP) values for a risk prevention of dying in an avalanche. We present results of a contingent valuation (CV) study carried out in Austria in two different periods (fall...