Die vorliegende Dissertation besteht aus fünf unabhängigen Forschungspapieren über optimale Steuer- und Bildungspolitik, welche ich während meines Promotionsstudiums an der Universität Konstanz erstellt habe. Private Versicherungen gegen Einkommensrisiko können aufgrund von moral hazard...

Quantification of welfare changes due to trade liberalisation play a crucial role for political decision making. However, meaningful comparisons of simulation results from different sources are difficult. Often significant differences in simulated gains from liberalisation do not serve to...

The current obesity crisis in the United States is generating numerous alternative policy options for combating the problem. One alternative that has been widely proposed is an excise or sales tax on sugar-sweetened non-alcoholic beverages. This literature started out within a very simple...

The flow of agricultural products between countries is conditioned by several factors including domestic and trade policy tools for the main competing exporters countries, and macroeconomic variables (such as real income per capita, rate of population growth,etc). Important structural changes...

Vaccines against several common foodborne pathogens are being developed and could substantially alter the policy tools available to address foodborne illness. However, little analysis is available to suggest how social welfare would be affected by these new vaccines. To address this void, we use...

Colombia negotiated bilateral Trade Agreements (TAs) with the UnitedStates and with the MERCOSUR region (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, andUruguay). Colombian cattle and beef interest groups argue that TAshurt the local beef supply chain. We employ a partial equilibriumframework to assess the...

With the increasing research interests in biofuels, global implications of biofuels production have been generally examined either in a partial equilibrium (PE) or general equilibrium (GE) frameworks. Though both of these approaches have unique strengths, they also suffer from many limitations...

From the prospect of implementation of the Mercosul/UE agreement, which should allow the strengthening of the trade between the two blocks, we analyzed the possiblegains in two alternative scenarios of integration using a Partial Equilibrium Model for the estimation of trade creation and trade...

In order to compensate for the gap in price competitiveness derived from fossil fuel production still being more price-competitive than production of biofuels, the ethanol industry is heavily subsidized inside and protected from the outside in both the U.S. and Brazil. In this paper we assess...