Sub-Saharan African states urgently need expanded and more dynamic private sectors, more efficient and effective infrastructure/utility provision, and increased investment from both domestic and foreign sources. Privatization is one way to address these problems. But African states have...

Just as the courts must consider the tradeoff between the best interest of the child and parental rights in involuntary termination of parental rights, policy on international adoption must consider the tradeoffs between the best interest of the child and the long-term interests of the nation....

This paper estimates the impacts of disclosing information online and through the newspapers of gas stations that violate fuel supplying standards in Mexico. Using data from inspection histories, it finds that disclosing information online decreases the probability that any gas station would be...

Following the Hotelling model of spatial competition used by Massoud and Bernhardt (2002) to analyze competition in ATM fees, in this paper we analyze the effects of banning fees on the usage of ATMs by account holders. We find that the prohibition also reduces the fees charged to non-account...

In this study I review the main scientific contributions of Minsky and other scholars to the financial instability and crisis issues, and the role of institutions in modeling the medium and long financial and business waves. The topics developed in this paper are the following: the relationships...

We report an experiment contrasting the impacts of a tax and a cap rule in a single-product market with two privately-informed buyers. We discuss the effects on choice set and consumer surplus. The policy environment varies across treatments. With regulations, we aim to halve the size of the...

This paper considers the optimal design of an emissions trading program that includes a safety valve tax that allows pollution sources to escape the emissions cap imposed by the aggregate supply of emissions permits. I demonstrate that an optimal hybrid emissions trading/emissions tax policy...

We consider the pricing of a uniformly mixed pollutant when enforcement is costly with a model of optimal, possibly firm-specific, emissions taxes and their enforcement. We argue that optimality requires an enforcement strategy that induces full compliance by every firm. This holds whether or...

Under favorable but reasonable conditions, an imperfectly enforced emissions tax produces the efficient allocation of individual emissions control; aggregate emissions are independent of whether enforcement of the tax is sufficient to induce the full compliance of firms, and differences in...

Conventional wisdom among environmental economists is that the relative slopes of the marginal social benefit and marginal social cost functions determine whether a price-based or quantity-based environmental regulation leads to higher expected social welfare. We revisit the choice between...