"Robot cars" are cars that allow for automated driving. They can drive closer together than human driven "normal cars" and thereby raise road capacity. Obtaining a robot car instead of a normal car can also be expected to lower the userś value of time losses (VOT), because travel time can be...

Public goods are dealt with in two literatures that neglect each other. Mechanism design advises a social planner that expects individuals to misrepresent their valuations. Experiments study the provision of the good when preferences might be non-standard. We introduce the problem of the...

Global warming can be curbed by pricing carbon emissions and thus substituting fossil fuel with renewable energy consumption. Breakthrough technologies (e.g., fusion energy) can reduce the cost of such policies. However, the chance of such a technology coming to market depends on investment. We...

When drivers opt for carpooling, road capacity will be freed up, and this will reduce congestion. Therefore, carpooling is interesting for policy makers as a possible solution to congestion. We investigate the effects of carpooling in a dynamic equilibrium model of congestion, which captures...

Habits are an important cause of sluggish consumption adjustment in response to price shocks. This paper studies shifts within the consumption bundle under endogenous habit formation. I put forward a model with good-specific, or "deep", habits that cause persistence in good-specific consumption....

We study optimal corrective taxation in the alcohol market. Consumption generates negative externalities that are non-linear in the total amount of alcohol consumed. If tastes for products are heterogeneous and correlated with marginal externalities, then varying tax rates on different products...

In this paper, we study regulation of externalities involving many small-scale polluters, where the damages from emissions depend on the polluters' locations. Examples include nutrient and pesticide emissions from farms, particulate emissions from vehicles and home heating units, emissions of...

This paper has a twofold objective. First, we develop a new method to assess the monetary valuefor individuals of external effects. The method makes use of an ordinal index of life satisfaction asscored by individual respondents who are subjected in varying intensity to the external effect....

How is the optimal level of Pigouvian taxation influenced by distributive concerns? With second-best instruments, a higher level of income redistribution calls for a lower level of Pigouvian taxation. More redistribution implies higher distortions from income taxation. Pigouvian tax revenues...

We present a non-cooperative model of a family's time allocation between work and a home-produced public good, and examine whether the income tax should apply to couples or individuals. While tax-induced labor supply distortions lead to overprovision of the public good, spouses' failure to...