The regulation of genetically modified products pursuant to statutes enacted decades prior to the advent of biotechnology has led to a system that is passive rather than proactive about risks, that has difficulty adapting to biotechnology advances, and that is highly fractured and inefficient -...

There are conflicting views on how to handle permits for greenhouse gases in cost-benefit analysis. This paper aims at clarifying within a simple general equilibrium model how to treat different kinds of trade-able permits in economic evaluations of projects. Within a framework that reminds of...

The decision of whether to release transgenic crops in the EU is one subject to flexibility, uncertainty, and irreversibility. We analyse the case of herbicide tolerant sugar beet and reassess whether the 1998 de facto moratorium of the EU on transgenic crops for sugar beet was correct from a...

In this paper we argue that strong political economy forces explain the rush of the EU to expand eastwards. We use a model of vertical product differentiation in order to claim that technologically- advanced EU firms (residing in high-income member countries) prefer a mutual market-opening with...

In many organizations, decisions are taken by unanimity giving each member veto power. We analyze a model of an organization in which members with heterogenous productivity privately contribute to a common good. Under unanimity, the least efficient member imposes her preferred effort choice on...