The recent general trend of cutting top marginal income tax rates in industrialized economies and the policy concern of enhancing competition in the US and the EU product markets subtly motivate the question if low income tax rates are optimal in an economy with imperfectly competitive markets....

The Ramsey approach to optimal taxation and Ramsey tax rules have amassed substance in economic theory. However, they are often criticized on grounds of practicality, fairness, feasibility and some other aspects of designing actual tax policy. This paper presents a collection of these views; it...

This paper explores current account dynamics in eight small economies of Asia to examine whether or not capital flows have been excessive in these countries. Standard assumptions of perfect capital mobility and small open economy are jointly instrumental in simplifying theoretical tractability...

Capital account liberalization and exchange rate regime choice, what scope for flexibility in Tunisia? The adoption by Tunisia of structural reforms of its economy in a context of gradual opening since 1986, had allowed the instauration in January 1993 of the convertibility of its current...

The recent debates over discriminatory versus uniform-price auctions in the UK and elsewhere have revealed an incomplete understanding of the limitations of some popular auction models when applied to real-world electricity markets. This has led certain regulatory authorities to prefer...

In a Bayesian game players play an unknown game. Before the game starts some players may receive a signal regarding the specific game actually played. Typically, information structures that determine different signals, induce different equilibrium payoffs.In zero-sum games the equilibrium payoff...

This paper characterizes interim efficient mechanisms for public good production and cost allocation in a two-type environment with risk neutral, quasi-linear preferences and fixed size projects, where the distribution of the private good, as well as the public goods decision, affects social...

We study the issue of project choice when a risk-averse agent must choose whether to invest in two projects of the same type (focus) or of different types (diversification). Projects of the same type are subject to common type-specific shocks. Hence focusing is more risky within each period, but...