The mobility of the tax base may influence fiscal outcomes. The many theoretical contributions about the role of mobility are not matched by empirical evidence. Existing studies address strategic interaction between governments, but have little to say about mobility. We introduce a new measure...

This paper studies how changes in welfare benefit levels affect welfare recipients' residential choices. Although several empirical studies have stressed that welfare policy may affect residential choices of welfare recipients, few studies have simultaneously taken into account that residential...

Previous literature has shown that competition among regional governments may lead to inefficiently low levels of capital taxation, because governments do not take account of the external benefits of capital flight to other regions. However, the fiscal distortion is smaller the more elastic the...

Cost-benefit analysis have been attacked by many critics because of its implicit ethical assumptions. The normative content of the method is at odds with the common attitude that economists should analyze how to reach given goals, while determination of the goals should be left to the...

Members of the Norwegian Parliament were interviewed about the decision process concerning national road investments. Most of them found cost-benefit analysis useful, but apparently not as a device for ranking projects. Rather, the cost-benefit ratio was used to pick project proposals requiring...

This article studies the process from data acquisition to policy decision in relation to an optimum policy on global warming. Policymakers must be reasonably skeptical before proposing remedies to curb warming, but policymakers cannot await the final proof of any proposal's merit. Balancing...

The U.S. Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 initiated the first large experiment in the use of market-based regulation to control environmental problems with the introduction of an emissions trading program for sulfur dioxide emissions. Later that decade the second large trading program began for...

This paper examines compromise spaces between competing perspectives on four key climate change issues: costs, level of domestic action, environmental integrity, and developing world involvement. Based on extensive simulations of a model integration tool, SAP12 (Stochastic Assessment of Climate...

For years economists have urged policymakers to use market-based approaches such as cap-and-trade programs or emission taxes to control pollution. The SO2 allowance market created by Title IV of the 1990 U.S. Clean Air Act Amendments represents the first real test of the wisdom of economists’...

This paper analyzes estimators based on the instrumental variable quantile regression (IVQR) model (Chernozhukov and Hansen, 2004, 2005, 2006) under the local quantile treatment effects (LQTE) framework (Abadie et al., 2002). I show that the quantile treatment effect (QTE) estimators in the IVQR...