It is well known that modern governments are unwilling to use poll taxes because it corresponds to political suicide. Still, poll taxes are allegedly the most efficient form of taxation. Building on Eaton and Rosen (1980) and Peck (1989), the goal of this paper is to show a case where an excise...

Since CERCLA's legislation in the United States, extending the liability to banks in case of an environmental damage has been the main concern of many studies. Most of them show that this form of regulation cannot reach its two main objectives because it is not possible to simultaneously improve...

We discuss the difficult question of measuring the effects of asymmetric information problems on resource allocation. Two of them are retained: moral hazard and adverse selection.

The first-order approach, which consists in replacing the incentive compatible constraint by the agent's first order condition, is widely used in agency problems where the principal cannot observe the level of effort chosen by the agent. This substitution is valid with the Monotone Likelihood...