Regional policies that seek to reduce economic inequalities between regions are common. These policies normally involve subsidies or transfers to the poorest regions. Over any given short-term horizon such subsidies serve to reduce inter-regional inequalities, but as they also affect migration...

Firms that engage in exporting normally enter their first export markets a number of years after beginning to sell locally, then enter subsequent export markets progressively. Standard trade models are essentially static and do not capture these elementary facts about exporting, which biases the...

The number of people living with HIV is alarmingly large. In addition to the incomprehensible human suffering of those directly affected, AIDS also has large, negative economic effects. In this paper, I study the fiscal implications of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa in a standard...

This paper studies whether the degree of female representation in Swedish local councils <p> affects local public expenditure patterns. Theoretically, the individual preferences of elected <p> representatives may impact public expenditure if full policy commitment is not feasible. To <p> empirically...</p></p></p>

In 2005 EU will launch its emissions trading system (ETS) under which energy intensive firms within EU may trade carbon emission allowances. This system is by many seen as instrumental for EU’s ability to fulfill its Kyoto commitment. At the same time, in what seems to be an ambition to go one...

A theoretical model of excise tax evasion is developed in this paper. The dynamics of a change in tax policy is derived, under the assumption that consumers benefit from a lower price when entering a "black market". However, entry also impose a sunk cost, which gives rise to asymmetric effects...

This paper investigates the effect of applying gender quotas on policy decisions. I first examine the effect of gender quotas on the representation of female legislators, study the correlation between gender quotas and different types of government expenditures, and then use quotas as an...

An intertemporal general equilibrium model of criminal behavior is used to analyze the effect on crime of changing policy parameters. The policy parameters are the length of the prison term, the severity of punishment, and the amount of police resources. The number of crimes in society can be...

The increased demand for a more equal parental sharing of the responsibilities for children has led many countries to reconstruct their parental leave systems so to provide stronger incentives for fathers to participate in childcare. Father’s quotas are becoming widely spread across Europe....

We examine the interplay between monetary and fiscal policies in a context where disturbances to the public deficit process are a primary source of macroeconomic instability. We perform simulations of optimal targeting rules on a sticky-price model `a la Woodford (1997). Our investigation...