In the last two decades, many U.S. states introduced support policies to promote electricity generation from renewable energy sources. Renewable portfolio standards are their most popular policy choices to date. This paper tackles the question why some state legislators were front-running the...

This paper considers various policy measures to reduce traffic externalities in cities, including externality-reducing investments, tolls, emission standards, low emission zones, and bypass capacity to guide traffic around the city center. Using a simple model that distinguishes local and...

Sharp nonparametric bounds are derived for Hicksian compensating and equivalent variations. These “i-bounds” generalize earlier results of Blundell, Browning and Crawford (2008). We show that their e-bounds are sharp under the Weak Axiom of Revealed Preference (WARP). They do not require...

This paper develops a revealed preference methodology for exploring whether time inconsistencies in household choice are the product of nonstationarities at the individual level or the result of individual heterogeneity and renegotiation within the collective unit. An empirical application to...

We characterize a new quasi-ordering on the collection of opportunity (or choice) sets. This new rule combines two criteria: the individual preferences on the universal set of options and the number of maximal options in the opportunity set. This new rule is compared with the indirect utility...

We compare absolute, relative and intermediate views on the evolution of global inequality between 1980 and 2009. According to the relative view, inequality remains invariant after a uniform proportional change of all incomes whereas the absolute view requires invariance to a uniform change of...

Economic interests, the influence of economic ideas and politics have been put forward in the literature as explanations for the British Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. In this paper, we will evaluate these competing explanations using the case of the liberalization of Belgian corn tariffs. The...

Provision of most public goods (e.g., health care, library services, education, utilities) can be characterised by a two-stage ‘production’ process. The first stage translates basic inputs (e.g., labour and capital) into service potential (e.g., opening hours), while the second stage...

Students’ evaluations of teacher performance (SETs) are increasingly used by universities and colleges for teaching improvement and decision making (e.g., promotion or tenure). However, SETs are highly controversial mainly due to two issues: (1) teachers value various aspects of excellent...

We investigate how moral concerns about permit trading affect an endogenous pollution permit trading equilibrium, where governments choose non-cooperatively the amount of permits they allocate to domestic industries. Politicians may feel reluctant to allow permit trading and/or may prefer that...