We study an endogenous growth model where a profit-motivated R and D sector coexists with the introduction of free blueprints invented by philanthropists. These goods are priced at marginal cost, contrary to proprietary ones which are produced by a monopoly owned by the inventor. We show that...

The European Union has recently proposed sectoral tax differentiation as a policy to fight unemployment. The member countries are allowed to reduce the VAT rates on goods and services that are particularly labor intensive and price elastic. The paper provides a theoretical analysis of the...

In several industries downstream competitors form upstream partnerships. An important rationale is that higher aggregate upstream volume might generate efficiencies that reduce both fixed and marginal costs. Our focus is on the latter. We show that if upstream marginal costs are decreasing in...

This paper explores the impact of product liability on vertical product differentiation when product safety is perfectly observable. In a two-stage competition, duopolistic firms are subject to strict liability and segment the market such that a low-safety product is marketed at a low price to...

We extend structural gravity models of bilateral trade flows to oligopolistic competition. We show that conventional gravity estimates do not only reflect trade costs but also market power. Our simple estimation procedure generalizes the standard gravity model and disentangles exogenous trade...

We build a two-country model with an international duopoly and capital-market integration. We examine how the convergence of the cost of capital, due to its mobility, affects the welfare of each country and their joint welfare. We find that international capital mobility, which equalizes the...

This paper studies the market and welfare effects of two main tax reforms - the Corporate Business Income Tax (CBIT) and the Allowance for Corporate Equity tax (ACE). Using an imperfect-competition model for a small open economy, it is shown that the well-known neutrality property of ACE does...

This paper studies a market for a medical product in which there is perfect competition among health insurers, while the good is sold by a monopolist. Individuals differ in their severity of illness and there is ex post moral hazard. We consider two regimes: one in which insurers use coinsurance...

We explore the possibility of achieving a cooperative outcome when governments act non-cooperatively in a strategic environmental policy model where emission permit markets are linked. We introduce a specific distribution scheme of the permit revenues between the exporting countries so as to...

This paper studies the design of health insurance with ex post moral hazard, when there is imperfect competition in the market for the medical product. Various scenarios, such as monopoly pricing, price negotiation or horizontal differentiation are considered. The insurance contract specifies...