AbstractTax competition poses two problems for international cooperation: defection and distributive conflict. Multilateral cooperation to stop tax competition may fail because states face incentives to renege on their promises or because they face adverse distributional consequences, either of...

Tax competition poses two problems for international cooperation: defection and distributive conflict. Multilateral cooperation to stop tax competition may fail because states face incentives to renege on their promises or because they face adverse distributional consequences, either of which...

Recent trade negotiations, both at the regional and multilateral level, have seen a resurgence of the issue of trade and labour standards. Labour interests in high-standards countries argue that low labour standards are an unfair source of comparative advantage, and that increasing imports from...

This paper examines transition dynamics in a search economy. We contrast two extreme cases: a completely unexpected reform and a fully anticipated reform. We view the former as a metaphor for a reform being announced and implemented with immediate effect, the latter as a metaphor for a reform...

When shock therapy is politically infeasible, will gradualism work? Mussa (1986) conjectured, in the context of a neoclassical model of adjustment, that the answer was ‘yes’. This paper takes up the Mussa conjecture by: (i) building a political-economy model in which it makes sense; (ii)...

This study is motivated by frequent calls to harmonize labor standards across countries, which result from the fear that economic integration (and the accompanying liberalization of trade flows) will lead to an erosion of working conditions, as countries deliberately try to reducelabor standards...

This paper reconsiders the welfare effects of "tariff jumping" direct investment if mobile capital is subjected to taxation. In contrast to the conventional wisdom, the receiving country may in this case gain from the incremental inflow of capital, as this diverts tax revenues from the rest of...

This paper contributes to ongoing debates on international income comparisons by deploying a novel methodology for constructing empirical distribution functions for the United States and Canada over the period 1993 - 2000. We also conduct tests for first, second, third order stochastic dominance...

In this note, we consider a perennial problem in single-person choice theory, that is, characterizing choice under uncertainty. In particular, we consider a hypothesis put forward by Joseph Stiglitz (2005), suggesting that median-maximing behavior may be optimal under certain circumstances, and...