I examine the implications of increasing stock market globalisation for the economics of protection. European, Japanese and Australian data mostly indicate that over 30 per cent of the stock market is now foreign-owned, a large increase on the 1980s. Foreign share ownership in the USA is lower,...

In international trade policy, the concept of market access is pivotal. Yet, it remains a neglected category in institutional-economics approaches to international trade. The paper introduces a new analytical category, which relates explicitly to the exchange of market access among governments:...

Most economists consider the debate on free trade closed for all practical purposes. DLUHOSCH, FREYTAG and KRUEGER [1998] criticize an earlier paper by BATRA and BELADI [1996] and argue that freer trade has contributed to a rise in US growth of investment and social welfare. Using raw figures,...

The US deficit on current account is frequently considered to be a problem of the US. A recently published paper by BATRA and BELADI [1996] is a case in point. By drawing on a revealed preference framework they claim that it might be better for the US to impose trade restrictions in order to...

This paper presents a theoretical model in which governments regulate economic activity and individuals bypass the regulations by paying bribes to the public officials who monitor their businesses; the amount of the bribe is the subject of bargaining. The paper then introduces a policy that...

Escalating penalties for repeat offenders are a pervasive feature of punishment schemes in various contexts, but economic theory has had a hard time rationalizing the practice. This paper reviews the literature on escalating penalties, and then develops a theory based on uncertainty on the part...

How do we make sense of the cross-country heterogeneity in value judgments emerging from international surveys? Our study suggests that the answer needs to go beyond the adaptation of values to existing institutions and should tap into deeper beliefs. In our case, Finnish respondents do support...

This paper presents a model of quantity regulation as a policy variable when regulation enforcement is imperfect. The model provides a counterintuitive result: that equilibrium congestion can become worse as the quantity restriction becomes more severe. Intuitively, stricter regulation makes the...

This paper presents an incomplete contracting model to show how judicial corruption and judicial favoritism can lead to distortions in agents' incentives to invest in relation-specific assets and cause inefficiency. I also show that while an increase in the judge's income always increases...

This paper models the link between teenage delinquency rates and underlying measures of human and social capital and tests its predictions on a large Montreal database. The model allows teenagers to choose among a number of competing time uses, and the empirical work uses binary and ordered...