This paper evaluates the welfare gains arising from a deeper trade integration in the European Monetary Union. To do this, the European Monetary Union is represented in a realistic way by an intertemporal general equilibrium model with incomplete financial markets, sticky prices and home bias...

The objective of this paper is to analyze the efficiency and equity consequences of the implementation of an environmental tax. Do the two purposes collide or can they be simultaneously achieved? Using results of the related literature, we show that precise conditions have to be met in order to...

This paper investigates the implications of an endogenous social work norm for the optimal welfare state program. Assuming that individual productivity is observable, the analysis finds that restrictions on program participation, implying a larger benefit to a smaller group of recipients, may be...

We study the pricing and welfare implications of changing the VAT status of the national postal operator (NPO) from exempt to rated. We build a model where the NPO offers both single-piece and bulk mail to customers, some of them VAT rated, others VAT exempt. We solve for the optimal Ramsey...

The paper investigates both quantity and price oligopoly games in markets with a variable number of managerial and entrepreneurial firms which defines market structure. Following Vickers (Economic Journal, 1985) which establishes an equivalence between the equilibrium under unilateral delegation...

The Chinese grain policy reforms were implemented in 1994. The grain price subsidies were eliminated which led to a substantial grain price increase. This paper examines the welfare changes associated with the grain policy reforms. All welfare measures unambiguously show that the consumers...

This paper examines the robustness of Deaton’s widely used method for estimating consumer responses. While unit values, ratios of expenditures to quantities purchased, are often employed in demand analysis as proxies for missing market prices, Deaton argues bias is likely to result as a...

The effects of public policies on the welfare of different groups in society are in many cases unclear. Economists often study such effects through welfare analyses based on a mathematical model of an individual decision maker. I show for the case of Rational Addiction theory that we have both...

Cyclical components are analytically computed in a theoretical model of stochastic endogenous fluctuations and growth. Volatility is shown to depend on the speed of convergence of the cyclical component, the expected length of a cycle and on the attitude of the slump. Taxes affect these channels...

This paper analyzes the environmental tax policy issues when labor is heterogeneous. The objective is to assess whether an environmental tax policy could be Pareto improving, when the revenue of the pollution tax is recycled by a change in the labor tax properties. We show that, depending on the...