Recently, it became customary to argue that environmental quality - like ordinary public consumption - is crowded out by distortionary taxation. We show that this hypothesis does not hold provided that the marginal revenue of the environmental tax is positive. In this case, under-provision of...

Due to the use of distortionary taxation, real-world economies should attain a lower level of public expenditures than one might suspect from the analysis of artificial models where lump-sum taxes are assumed to be available. The paper examines this popular hypothesis by means of the two-type...

On the basis of problems related to asymmetric information, self-governance has been proposed and often empirically found to be superior to the external imposition of rules in social dilemma situations. The present paper suggests and experimentally analyses a different line of argument, namely...

Negotiation is a word that gains more importance nowadays. Understanding the bargaining process is an issue that people, enterprises, labor unions and governments are caring about. The main point studied here is the issue of how the government takes positions in a bargaining process with its...

While objective news coverage is vital to democracy, media bias can seriously distort collective decisions. This Paper develops a voting model where citizens are uncertain about the welfare effects induced by alternative policy options and derive information about those effects from the mass...

We study the residential choice of siblings who are altruistic towards their parents. If some sibling moves further away, he or she can shift some of the burden of taking care of the parents to his or her siblings. Thus, siblings have a strategic incentive to move away that only children do not...

This paper integrates the distributive politics literature with the literature on decentralization by incorporating inter-regional project externalities into a standard model of distributive policy. A key finding is that the degree of uniformity (or 'universalism') of the provision of regional...

By examining several different types of open institutions including open source software, open science, open square and (open) urban planning, this paper presents a general analysis of open institutional structure that is complementary to traditional proprietary mode. We argue that open...

Abstract Non-cooperative game theoretical models of self-enforcing international environmental agreements (IEAs) that employ the cartel stability concept of d'Aspremont et al. (1983) frequently use the assumption that countries can sign a single agreement only. We modify the assumption by...

This paper adds to the literature on the voluntary provision of public goods by showing that the warm glow that individuals gain depends on the perceived relative effectiveness of contributions. We use a new survey on pro-environment behaviors, attitudes, and knowledge and find that individuals...