We study the incentives to expropriate foreign capital under democracy and obligarchy. We model a two-sector small open economy where foreign investment triggers Stolper-Samuelson effects through reducing exporting costs. We show how incentives to expropriate depend on the distributional effects...

Starting with a world where all countries apply Nash-optimal tariffs aginst all imports, we ask when , if ever, a group of countries can gain by trading freely ("promise") and when, if ever, it pays an outsider to join them ("attractiveness").

The paper studies the impact of ambiguity on history-dependant beahviour in the standard microstructure model of financial markets. We show that differences in ambiguity attitudes between market makers and traders can generate contrarian and herding behaviour in stock markets where assets are...

We study dominant strategy implementation in the compromise setting of Borgers and Postl (2006), in which two agents have to choose one of three mutually exclusive alternatives. The agents' ordinal rankings of these three alternatives are commonly known among them, and they are diametrically...

In this paper we consider the relationship between output, the price level and the Central Bank's broad money aggregate, M2, which is a simple sum of six 'monies'. We consider by way of comparison a divisia index, which we adjust to allow, in the alternatively and conceptually divergent ways,...

This paper introduces E-capacities as a representation of beliefs which incorporates objective information about the probability of events. It can be shown that the Choquet integral of an E-capacity is the Ellsberg representation. The paper further explores properties of this representation of...

The simplest flat tax proposals envisage a single marginal tax rate applying on all income. In the context of a simple model where agents vary in ability to earn, we demonstrate (a) that everyone is better off in the long run with an income-tax exemption for investment, than without it, and (b)...

This paper examines two tax regimes in a world where abilities to earn differ. It compares the distributions of utilities under a “flat” tax regime where all income is subject to a common tax rate, and proceeds finance a common transfer paid to all, with one with a menu of tax rates and...