The empirical finding of an inverse U-shaped relationship between per capita income and pollution, the so-called Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), suggests that as countries experience economic growth, environmental deterioration decelerates and thus becomes less of an issue. Focusing on the...

This paper investigates the relationship between intra-industry trade (IIT) and immigration flows using a gravity model for the period 2000-2010 between Portugal and European Union’s Member States (EU-27). The present study uses the methodology of Kandogan (2003) for separating IIT into its...

Driving restriction programs have been implemented in many cities around the world to alleviate pollution and congestion problems. Enforcement of such programs is costly and can potentially displace policing resources used for crime prevention and crime detection. Hence, driving restrictions may...

This paper explores the relationship between preferential and multilateral trade liberalization at the sectoral level using a unique dataset that includes data on most favored nation (MFN) and bilateral preferential tariffs at the 4-digit ISIC level for 11 Latin American countries over the...

Some regulatory reforms do not change just a specific signal that can be represented by a quantitative continuous variable, such as a tax rate, a price cap, or an emission threshold. The standard theory of reform in applied welfare economics (going back to contributions by e.g. Ramsey, Samuelson...

This paper introduces the concept of a steepest ascent tariff reform for a small open economy. By construction, it is locally optimal in that it yields the highest gain in utility of any feasible tariff reform vector of the same length. Accordingly, it provides a convenient benchmark for the...