The use of payment for environmental services (PES) is not a new type of contract, but PES programs have become more in vogue because of the potential for sequestering carbon by paying to prevent deforestation and degradation of forestlands. We provide a framework utilizing transaction costs to...

Forestry decentralization and devolution reforms involve the transfer of rights, resources and responsibilities related to the governance of forest resources. One of the consequences of these reforms is a reconfiguration of the patterns of interactions between multiple governance actors, which...

Local efforts to govern forests can benefit from support from organizations operating at broader governance scales. This paper investigates why local users value the support from some organizations more than others, and the extent to which these preferences matter for governance choices....

It is well known that the preferential tax treatment of housing induces an inefficient allocation of saving and investment. This paper analyzes, in a portfolio framework, how eliminating the deductibility of mortgage interest payments for federal income tax purposes might affect investment in...

This paper reviews the main issues that needs to be addressed in the taxation of capital gains. The main focus of the paper is on the tax treatment of capital gains in the United States. The impact of inflation on asset values and the taxation of gains have led to calls for an inflation-adjusted...

The effective rates of taxation faced by a representative investor located in a major capital exporting country for investments in machinery and buildings in nine capital importing European countries are compared. Poland and Hungary are found to have relatively high effective tax rates on...

What's wrong with foreign aid? Many policymakers, aid practitioners, and scholars have called into question its ability to increase economic growth, alleviate poverty, or promote social development. At the macro level, only tenuous links between development aid and improved living conditions...

Dozens of countries have decentralized at least part of their natural resource policies over the last two decades. Despite the length of time that these policy experiments have been in force, there is little agreement about their effectiveness. We argue that part of this ambivalence stems from...