Matching mechanisms are widely regarded as providing a promising way to cure the public good underprovision problem, but the Pareto optimal interior matching equilibrium emerges only under very special conditions. However, we show that public good underprovision is normally avoided.

This paper explores the outcome of an international environmental agreement when the governments are elected by their citizens. It also considers a voter's incentives for supporting candidates who are less green than she is. In the extreme case of "global" pollution, the elected politicians pay...

This paper surveys the theory on taxes on risky returns that originated from Domar and Musgrave (1944). Emphasis is given to the role of complete capital markets and on capital market imperfections arising from limited liability, moral hazard and adverse selection.

Recent international climate negotiations suggest that complete agreements are unlikely to materialize. Instead, partial cooperation between like-minded countries appears a more likely outcome. In this paper we analyze the effects of such partial cooperation between like-minded countries. In...

The Dasgupta-Heal-Solow-Stiglitz model of capital accumulation and resource depletion poses the following sustainability problem: is it feasible to sustain indefinitely a level of consumption that is bounded away from zero? We provide a complete technological characterization of the...

In a standard exhaustible resource model, it is known that if, along a competitive path, investment in the augmentable capital good equals the rents on the exhaustible resource (known as Hartwick's rule), then the path is equitable in the sense that the consumption level is constant over time....

A framework is developed for analyzing national income accounting using a revealed welfare approach that is sufficiently general to cover, both the standard discounted utilitarian and maximin criteria as special cases. We show that the basic welfare properties of comprehensive national income...