The present economic crisis comes against the background of decades of policy changesthat have generally weakened the capacity of social safety nets to offer citizens withadequate resources for financial survival when labour markets fail to do so. Building on datafor 24 European Union countries,...

Time consistency problems can arise when environmental taxes are employedto encourage firms to take irreversible abatement decisions. Setting a high carbontax, for instance, would induce firms to invest in low-carbon technology,yet once investment has occurred the government can then reduce the...

This paper measures the extent to which prices exceed marginal costs in the U.S. natural gas distributionmarket during the period 1991-2007. We find large departures from marginal cost pricing in all 50states, with residential and commercial customers facing average markups of over 40%. Based...

This paper analyzes the determinants of alternative automobile fuel regulation and developmentsupport with a particular focus on methanol fuel. We find that embedded interests, bureaucraticreforms, and political circumstances in the Chinese national, provincial, and municipalgovernments have all...

The absence or the presence of the resource curse is often explained by the specifics of politicaland institutional factors. The aim of this paper is to study this effect looking separately ateconomic and political institutions and at their interaction. Unlike most empirical papers inthe...

We analyze the long-term impacts of large-scale expansion of biofuels on land-usechange, food supply and prices, and the overall economy in various countries or regions using amulti-country, multi-sector global computable general equilibrium model augmented with an explicitland-use module and...

The EU Directive 2003/87/EC for the introduction of a European emission trading system has leftthe task of allocating the emission allowances mainly to the member states. In Germany the details of theallocation method are laid down in the Allocation Act (ZuG 2007). One central element of the...

This paper compares emissions trading based on a cap on total emissions (permit trading)and on relative standards per unit of output (credit trading). Two types of market structureare considered: perfect competition and Cournot oligopoly. The effect of combining the twoschemes is also...

Intellectual property rights are legal constraints that limit entry in industries where incumbentsare innovators. The set of legal constraints is the same for all industries, withoutconsidering that the externalities created by entry are not necessarily negative for the incumbentor that the...

Despite the empirical relevance of advertising strategies in concentrated markets,the economics literature is largely silent on the effect of persuasive advertisingstrategies on pricing, market structure and increasing (or decreasing) dominance.In a simple model of persuasive advertising and...