This paper studies the welfare effects of financial integration in the presence of moral hazard. Entrepreneurs face a trade off between risk and return. Banks may mitigate the resultant excessive risk by costly monitoring, where greater risk reduction requires more resources devoted to risk...

The focus of policy reform in developing countries has moved from getting prices right to getting institutions right, and accordingly countries are increasingly being advised to move towards quot;best-practicequot; institutions. This paper argues that appropriate institutions for developing...

What tariffs would countries impose if they did not have to fear any retaliation? What would occur if there was a complete breakdown of trade policy cooperation? What would be the outcome if countries engaged in fully efficient trade negotiations? And what would happen to trade policy...

This paper analyzes pharmaceutical pricing between and within countries to achieve second best static and dynamic efficiency. We distinguish countries with and without universal insurance, because insurance undermines patients' price sensitivity, potentially leading to prices above second-best...

A substantial literature examines second-best environmental policy, focusing particularly on how the Pigouvian directive that marginal taxes should equal marginal external harms needs to be modified in light of the preexisting distortion due to labor income taxation. Additional literature is...

When government needs more revenue than is available from a pollution tax rate equal to marginal environmental damage, our intuition tells us to raise the tax on the clean good above zero and to raise the tax on the dirty good above that first-best Pigouvian rate. Yet new results suggest that...

The nature, and normative properties, of competition in health care markets has long been the subject of much debate. In particular, policymakers have exhibited a great deal of reservation toward competition in health care markets, as demonstrated by the plethora of regulations governing the...

This study estimates parameters necessary to calculate the optimal second-best gasoline tax, most notably the cross-price elasticity between gasoline and leisure. Prior work indicates that in a second-best setting with distortionary income taxes, both the cost of environmental regulation and the...

This paper uses analytical and numerical general equilibrium models to study the costs of achieving pollution reductions under a range of environmental policy instruments in a second-best setting with pre-existing factor taxes. We compare the costs and efficiency impacts of emissions taxes,...

The adoption and diffusion of technological knowledge is generally regarded as a key element in a country's economic success. However, as is the case with most types of information, the transfer of technological knowledge is likely to be subject to adverse selection problems. In this paper we...