We study the political economy of social insurance in a world where individuals differ in both income and risk. Social insurance is financed through distortionary taxation and redistributes across income and risk. Individuals vote on social insurance that they can complement with insurance...

Despite the growing concern about actual on-going climate change, there is little consensus about the scale and timing of actions needed to stabilise the concentrations of greenhouse gases. Many countries are unwilling to implement effective mitigation strategies, at least in the short-term, and...

It is observed in the real world that taxes matter for location decisions and that multinationals shift profits by transfer pricing. The US and Canada use Formula Apportionment (FA) to tax corporate income, and the EU is debating a switch from Separate Accounting (SA) to FA. This paper develops...

This Paper analyses whether different emission trading regimes provide different incentives to participate in a cooperative climate agreement. Different incentive structures are discussed for those countries, namely the US, Russia and China, that are most important in the climate negotiation...

This Paper elaborates on the recent race to sequence the human genome. Starting from the debate arising from the genome case on public versus private research, the Paper shows that in some fundamental research areas, where knowledge externalities play an important role, market and non-market...

Alamar and Glantz interpret smoking in restaurants as a market failure, and they claim that restaurants should welcome government laws that disallow smoking in all restaurants. Contrary to their claims, restaurant owners do have an incentive to eliminate smoking if doing so raises the value of...

In the September 2007 critique of Alamar and Glantz, I argued that smoking in restaurants (and bars) does not constitute an externality and that Alamar and Glantz’s use of cross-sectional data to derive a price/sales ratio did not show us a meaningful picture of what happened before and...

“Smoking in Restaurants: Who Best Sets the House Rules?†by David Henderson, Econ Journal Watch 4(3), is a comment on our paper “Smokefree Laws Increase Restaurant Values,†Contemporary Economic Policy 22(4). Henderson asserts that restaurant owners can internalize all of the...

This paper makes a second reply to David R. Henderson, and concludes the exchange regarding the economics of smoke-free ordinances for restaurants.

Taxation data have been used to create long-run series for the distribution of top incomes in quite a number of countries. Most of these studies have focused on the national experience of individual countries, but we can also learn from cross-country comparisons. Comparative analysis is...