The success of joint liability programs depends on nature and composition of borrowing groups. Group formation is a costly process and in our model these costs vary with the social identity of group partners. We show that risk heterogeneity in a borrowing group may arise due to the social...

We consider a linear city model where both firms and consumers have to incur transport costs. Following a standard Hotelling (1929) type framework we analyze a duopoly where firms facing a continuum of consumers choose locations and prices, with the transportation rate being linear in distance....

Tax competition for a mobile factor is different in 'new economic geography set- tings' compared to standard tax competition models. The agglomeration rent which accrues to the mobile factor in the core region can be taxed. Moreover, a tax differential between the core and the periphery can be...

We analyze optimal income taxes with deductions for work-related or consumptive goods. We consider two cases. In the first case (called a complex tax system) the tax authorities can exactly distinguish between consumptive and work-related expenditures. In the second case (called a simple tax...

The relationship between per capita income and a number of pollution indicators has been found to display an inverted U-shaped or downward-sloping pattern. Corruption may affect this relationship in two distinct ways: by raising pollution at given income levels (direct effect) and by reducing...

The relationship between land investment and tenure security is usually tested in land scarce but peaceful areas. This article examines instead the effects of land abundance and war for investment and tenure security. The paper demonstrates that war enhances land abundance. This implies that...

The paper presents a model where public pensions are determined by majority voting. Voters differ by age and income. Moreover, life expectancy increases with income. Depending on the strength of the link between contributions and benefits, and the relationship between income and life expectancy,...

The paper compares non-cooperative commodity taxation under the destination and origin principles under a variety of different assumptions about market structure. We consider a model of international duopoly with either quantity or price competition of firms and either segmented or integrated...

We extend the analysis of Christoffersen and Diebold (1998) on long-run forecasting in cointegrated systems to multicointegrated systems. For the forecast evaluation we consider several loss functions, each of which has a particular interpretation in the context of stock-flow models where...

In this paper we present explanation on the phenomenon pointed out in Cook and Manning (2002) on the unusual behaviour of the Dickey-Fuller test in the presence of trend misspecification. It appears that the rejection frequency of the unit root tests in the presence of trend misspecification is...