This thesis consists of a summary and four papers. The first two papers address political economy and industrial organization aspects of agricultural policy, and the last two international aspects of environmental policy. Paper [1] explains Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) subsidies to farmers...

In a path-breaking but largely overlooked study, published in a festchrift thirty years ago (1975), Herman Van der Wee provided a comparison of prices and real wages of building craftsmen in the regions of Antwerp and south-eastern England, from 1400 to 1700. To do so, he constructed a composite...

In this note, we extend the traditional search and matching framework to take account of the different levels at which negotiations take place. We show that, in the absence of any distortion, sector-level bargaining ought to be less efficient than bargaining taking place at the other levels. It...

This paper concerns the welfare consequences of environmental policy cooperation in a two-country economy. We assume that the countries finance their public expenditures by using distortionary taxes, and that they differ with respect to competition in the labor market. The purpose is to...

This paper concerns public good provision under distortionary labor income taxation. The labor market is characterized by imperfect competition due to the influence of unions over wage formation. We show that a tradeoff between employment and hours of work per employee influences the welfare...

This paper concerns optimal factor income taxation and provision of a public good in a small open economy, which is characterized by union wage setting. The analysis is based on a general equilibrium model, where the hours of work are endogenous, and the tax instruments are linear taxes on labor...