We use a public economics framework to consider how pharmaceuticals should be priced when at least some of the R&D incentive comes from sales revenues. We employ familiar techniques of public finance to adjust standard pricing prescriptions in the context of global diseases, in which...

This paper uses the National Survey of America's Families (NSAF) to examine whether the low take-up rate for publicly provided health insurance is caused by welfare stigma that people associate with those programs. The NSAF asks several questions related to welfare stigma, including whether...

This paper addresses the question of how the responsibility for the delivery of social services, including health, education, and welfare programs, should be divided between state and central governments. We combine a random voting model and the incomplete contracts paradigm to formalize the...

This paper estimates the extent to which stringent environmental standards in some U.S. states have deterred foreign direct investment (FDI). It addresses three shortcomings in the existing literature on the economic effects of environmental regulations. First, it avoids comparing regulations in...

We propose a concept of self-enforcing risk-sharing agreement that are robust not only to single-person deviations but also to potential deviations by subgroups, requiring that the deviating subgroup itself employs some self-enforcing risk-sharing agreement. We observe that the stability of...

This paper offers an empirical analysis of harvest functions for the two main Chilean pelagic fisheries, which are characterized by cyclical fish abundance. Two main results are obtained. First, we identify production-side effects that weaken the incentives to adjust towards lower fishing...

This paper examines the effects of state corporate income taxes on the location of foreign direct investment in the U.S., taking into account the endogeneity of taxes and the outside options of investors. States have a set of characteristics that influence investors' decisions, some of them are...

A canonical interpretation of an infinitely repeated game is that of a "dynastic" repeated game: a stage game repeatedly played by successive generations of finitely-lived players with dynastic preferences. These two models are in fact equivalent when the past history of play is observable to...

Concerns about devolving environmental regulatory powers to lower levels of government permeate debates in the U.S. and Europe about the appropriate level of regulatory authority. In theory, given a long list of conditions, regulatory competition by local governments can be efficient in the same...