A full understanding of public affairs requires the ability to distinguish between the policies that voters would like the government to adopt, and the influence that different voters or group of voters actually exert in the democratic process. We consider the properties of a computable...

This paper proposes a model of natural-resource exploitation when private ownership requires costly enforcement activities. For a given wage rate, it is shown how enforcement costs can increase with labor's average productivity on a resource site. As a result, it is never optimal for the site...

We analyze the behavior of a nonrenewable resource cartel that anticipates being forced, at some date in the future, to break-up into an oligopolistic market in which its members will then have to compete as rivals. Under reasonable assumptions about the value function of the individual firms in...

Ranking development programs using integrals of discounted utilities can yield drastic consequences that offend our sense of justice. New alternative social welfare criteria should be considered. A reaction to discounted utilitarianism is to moderate its effects by adding to the social welfare...

This paper considers an environment where individual actions have externalities, and where there are two types of agents: socially responsible agents (the good) and selfish agents. Selfish agents have payoff functions that do not take into account social welfare. The payoff of a socially...

We propose a simple model of a partially integrated industry which explicitly takes into account persistent production cost differences across upstream firms, such as one might observe in natural resource industries. The model allows us to highlight the respective roles of strategic...

We show that (i) subsidies for renewable energy policies with the intention of encouraging substitution away from fossil fuels may accentuate climate change damages by hastening fossil fuel extraction, and that (ii) the opposite result holds under some specified conditions. We focus on the case...

We analyze the behavior of a nonrenewable resource cartel that anticipates being forced, at some date in the future, to break-up into an oligopolistic market in which its members will then have to compete as rivals. Under reasonable assumptions about the value function of the individual firms in...

There is a growing interest in multi-sector models that combine aggregate balanced growth, consistent with the well-known Kaldor facts, with systematic changes in the relative importance of each sector, consistent with the Kuznets facts. Although variations in the income elasticity of demand...