Election finances are usually lightly regulated in emerging democracies. As these democracies mature they seek to impose campaign spending limits, limits on contributions, and disclosure laws. The present paper reviews the experience with such laws in the United States and Canada and contrasts...

This paper investigates the effects of the sources of candidates' campaign funding on their electoral outcomes, with particular emphasis on whether candidates who rely on a narrow base of funding suffer adverse electoral consequences. An extensive dataset consisting of over 650,000 contributions...

Spending limits are an important rule in the electoral game. Critics of limits claim that incumbents write these rules to keep down promising challengers. Their arguments are seductive but do not stand on a firm empirical base. The data seem quite eager to support or reject the critics' view,...

The economics of information goods suggest the need for institutional intervention to address the problem of revenue extraction from investments in resources characterized by high fixed costs of production and low marginal costs of reproduction and distribution. Solutions to the appropriation...

We give the reader a tour of good energy optimization models that explicitly deal with uncertainty. The uncertainty usually stems from unpredictability of demand and/or prices of energy, or from resource availability and prices. Since most energy investments or operations involve irreversible...

The periodical re-auction of a water monopoly concession causes the danger of underinvestment. If the life-time of specific assets such as water pipes exceeds the contract length and transferring the ownership of assets is difficult, the incumbent franchisee faces a hold-up problem. Using a...

Due to the increasing discussion about liberalisation in the piped water industry municipal authorities in several European countries consider modifications of their water utilities’ structure such as legal constitution, business objectives or private participation. The purpose of this paper...

This paper surveys water pricing models, highlighting some important results. Efficiency rquires marginal cost pricing. Intra-annual price changes or customer differentiation to reflect differences in marginal costs can enhance efficiency. A marginal cost pricing mechanism may signal the value...

This paper tackles the complex issue of how buyers and sellers within a domestic carbon credit system designed to include regenerating indigenous forest would optimally design contracts for trades of the new good, “carbon sink credits”. The paper begins by briefly defining the constraints...

As tradeable permit programmes mature, two inter-related issues are becoming more critical in creating viable responses to a long-term, highly uncertain environmental problem such as climate change. First, we need to update policies in response to new information; and second, we need to design...