It is a widely held view that efficient environmental policies regulating transboundary pollution will be adopted only if there is interjurisdictional coordination. Efficient policies can be adopted as a result of interstate treaties or mandated by a central authority. However, if the policies...

When the state fails to supply basic security and protection of property, violent entrepreneurs not only seize the opportunity of plundering, but some also enter the protection business and provide protection against plunderers. This uncoordinated division of labor is advantageous for the entire...

Consider a contract between two players, describing the payment an agent obtains from the principal, in exchange for a good or service supplied. At each point in time, either player may unilaterally demand a renegotiation of the contract, involving renegotiation costs for both players....

Dornbusch’s exchange rate overshooting hypothesis is a central building block in international macroeconomics. Yet, empirical studies of monetary policy have typically found exchange rate effects that are inconsistent with overshooting. This puzzling result has developed into a “styled...

The Kyoto Agreement is the result of international negotiations over many years. However, because of a number of weaknesses, different sorts of climate agreement have been suggested: for example, coordinated R&D activities that reduce abatement costs for all firms. We will compare an agreement...

I derive an explicit solution for the saddle path in a Ramsey growth model. The existence of a closed form expression greatly simpliÞes the analysis of how the parameters of the utility function affects investments and growth.

The key question in hydropower production is the time pattern of the use of the water in the reservoir. The water used to produce electricity today can alternatively be used tomorrow. The analysis of the operation of hydropower is therefore essentially a dynamic one. The paper introduces some...

The paper considers alternative monetary policy regimes within a calibrated macroeconomic model with a traded and a non-traded sector. Two classes of regimes are considered; inflation targeting and exchange rate targeting. When the target variable is completely stabilized, both rules have poor...

I derive the exact small sample properties of the instrumental variables estimator using a trigonometric approach. The distribution for the estimation error is decomposed into a product of three components - each with an intuitive interpretation. This approach helps the discussion on what...

We study an economy where a required amount of household production can be carried out either by each household itself, or purchased in the regular or ”black” market. We assume that the economy has two types of individuals, one with low productivities, and another with high productivities...