In the past there was hardly any use of economic instruments in environmental policy, mainly command and control measures were used. More recently, ecological taxes as well as tradable permits became more popular and voluntary agreements have been implemented. Using the Public Choice approach we...

This paper analyzes the effect of trade liberalization on government spending in a general equilibrium model with a continuum of industries supplying tradable and nontradable goods under monopolistic competition. Trade liberalization is modeled as the opening up of product markets between two...

An important source of conflict surrounding nuclear energy is that with a very small probability, a large-scale nuclear accident may occur. One way to internalize the associated financial risks is through mandating nuclear operators to have liability insurance. This paper presents estimates of...

The usual decomposition of effects in corner solution models into extensive and intensive margins is generally incompatible with a causal interpretation. This paper proposes a decomposition based on the joint distribution of potential outcomes which is meaningful in a causal sense. The...

Are national or multinational firms better lobbyists? This paper analyzes the extent of national environmental regulation when policy is determined in a lobbying game between a government and firm. We compare the resulting regulation levels for national and multinational firms. We identify three...

This paper investigates empirically the effect of import diversity on government size and provides evidence for the love of variety effect on government spending described in Hanslin (2008). I argue that crowding out of firms is an important cost of public good provision. However, due to the...

The search for economically efficient policy instruments designed to promote the diffusion of renewable energy technologies in liberalized markets has led to the introduction of quota-based tradable 'green' certificate (TGC) schemes for renewable electricity. However, there is a debate about the...

In the literature on optimal indemnity schedules, indemnities are usually restricted to be non-negative. Gollier (1987) shows that this constraint might well bind: insured could get higher expected utility if insurance contracts would allow payments from the insured to the insurer at some...

We examine the competitive effects of the vertical integration of gasoline refineries and retailers in the U.S. Adapting the first-order condition approach of static oligopoly games to the analysis of vertically related oligopolies, we develop a novel framework for directly evaluating the...

We analyze cooperative behavior in a prisoner's dilemma game with high stakes, face-to-face communication, and two rounds of pre-play in which the two final contestants are endogenously selected via a voting process. Using data from the British television game show 'Golden Balls', we find a...