Economic development in East Germany is not uniform. The building and construction industry is booming but manufacturing industry is stagnating. The paper argues that severe distortions in relative factor prices are the cause of the dichotomous development. These distortions result from...

This paper analyses the effect of different types of regional subsidies to poor regions on industrial location, employment, income inequality - between and inside regions - and welfare. We show that the impact on location of such subsidies is stronger when trade costs are low. When firms are...

Traditional explanations for indirect trade through an entrepôt have focused on savings in transport costs and on the role of specialized agents in processing and distribution. We provide an alternative perspective based on the possibility that entrepôts may facilitate tariff evasion. Using...

The objective was given to identify which salary scales exist within micro-enterprises (SME’s) of the economical sector depending on tourism, through representative sample taking, as well as determining the sector to which the SME’s belong that generate greater revenue or, on the contrary,...

The standard theory that the first-best tax on pollution is equal to marginal environmental damages has been extended in two directions. First, many polluting activities are difficult to tax because they are not market transactions, and so recent papers have shown that the same effects can be...

There are constraints on pricing congestible facilities. First, if heterogeneous users are observationally indistinguishable, then congestion charges must be anonymous. Second, the time variation of congestion charges may be constrained. Do these constraints undermine the feasibility of marginal...

We consider a country where a king assigns benefits in accordance with privilege determined by the population’s proximity to the throne. People have different relative advantages in seeking privilege and in productive activity. The nature of the contest for privilege determines whether, in...

Should the income tax include a credit for short taxpayers and a surcharge for tall ones? The standard Utilitarian framework for tax analysis answers this question in the affirmative. Moreover, a plausible parameterization using data on height and wages implies a substantial height tax: a tall...

This paper investigates whether government support can act to increase exporting activity. We use a uniquely rich data set on Irish manufacturing plants and employ an empirical strategy that combines a non-parametric matching procedure with a difference-in-differences estimator in order to deal...

This paper reviews the empirical literature assessing the effects of subsidies for professional sports franchises and facilities. The evidence reveals a great deal of consistency among economists doing research in this area. That evidence is that sports subsidies cannot be justified on the...