Because of a long time frame, irreversible and specific investments, incomplete contracts andpolitical constraints, it is generally difficult for governments to commit themselves in a credibleway to a fixed petroleum tax regime. Many controversial renegotiations and tightenings of suchsystems...

Theories of irreversible investment suggest a negative relation between investment and uncertainty,and non-linear adjustment costs open for asymmetries in the adjustment of fixed capital. We proposean econometric modelling approach to estimate and test the key predictions of modern...

Topical issues in petroleum tax design are in this chapter discussed by means of a tax model for anet income tax system (Norway) and a representative PSA regime. We analyse the entire lifecycle of a typical petroleum project, i.e., the exploration decision is included. Many petroleumtax systems...

Shortages of rigs and personnel have encouraged creativity in designing incentive contracts in thedrilling sector. In particular for oil service contracts, since those companies have the most directcontrol of drilling efficiency. A large variety of contract types are in use, including within...

The oil companies are concerned to replace the petroleum reserves they producein order to maintain their future level of activity. Booked reserves alsorepresent an important input when analysts value these companies. Many producercountries want to control their own resources, a goal which can...

Recent research has demonstrated that while government expenditures are countercyclical inmost industrialized countries, they tend to be procyclical in developing countries. We develop adynamic political economy model to explain this phenomenon. In the model, public expendituresprovide insurance...

Both conventional wisdom and leading academic research view pork barrel spendingas antithetical to responsible policymaking in times of crisis. In this paper we presentan alternative view. When agents are heterogeneous in their ideology and in theirinformation about the economic situation,...

The key element of models of contest is the Contest Success Function (CSF) which specifiesthe winning probabilities of agents. The existing axiomatizations of CSFs assume thatcontestants can make only one type of investment. This paper generalizes these axiomatizationsto the case where each...

We show that the presence of loss aversion on the part of participantsin a Tullock imperfectly discriminating contest will significantlyreduce the proportion of the rent dissipated in the form of resourcesused up in the competition for that rent...

This paper considers the extent to which expenditure by contestants inimperfectly discriminating rent-seeking contests dissipates all or only partof the rent. In particular, we investigate strategic effects, technologicaleffects and asymmetry under an assumption of diminishing returns to...