Der Dienstleistungssektor hat in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten erheblich an Bedeutung gewonnen. Wo ist Deutschland im internationalen Dienstleistungshandel einzuordnen? Welche Faktoren bestimmen das Muster des internationalen Dienstleistungshandels? Wer kann von einer Öffnung der...

The Environmental Liability Act (Umwelthaftungsgesetz) enacted January 1, 1991 is claimed to have substantially tightened the environmental liability regime in Germany. The economic consequences of the amendment of the German environmental liability legislation initiated by the Sandoz accident...

A well known result in the economics of tort law is that in the case of a unilateral stochastic externality both a negligence rule and strict liability are in general able to achieve socially optimal precaution. It will be shown in this paper that this equivalence result does no longer hold if...

In providing precautionary incentives and allocating environmental risk, liability for environmental damages faces two difficulties: randomness of damages incurred and nonobservability of precautionary measures. Hence, a major obstacle in enforcing legal claims is the difficulty of proving...

The paper is concerned with effects of lobbying activities by political pressure groups that wish to affect environmental legislation. Two interest groups are considered, environmentalists on the one hand and a polluters' lobby on the other. These two groups can influence the environmental...