Recent empirical work suggests that declining industries lobby more successfully for policy concessions than do growing industries. This paper presents a novel and simple explanation for this phenomenon. It is shown that an industry in decline is constrained in its ability to raise revenue...

A common-agency lobbying model is developed to help understand why North America and the European Union have adopted such different policies toward genetically modified (GM) food. Results show that when firms (in this case farmers) lobby policy makers to influence standards and consumers and...

Contemporary neoclassical property tax incidence theory sees its historical antecedents in Alfred Marshall and H. G. Brown. Its origins can, however, be traced back to David Ricardo via the single tax movement. The classical Ricardian theory of local tax incidence has been misinterpreted by...

This paper presents a somewhat novel approach to explore the economic contribution of ecosystems. It develops linked models to capture connections between resource stocks and flows and the resulting microeconomic and macroeconomic impacts. A bioeconomic model is developed that is imbedded into a...

Most regulatory government agencies to monitor the degree of compliance. These tasks are usually delegated to bureaucrats who, as self interested agents, may engage in corrupt behaviour. Opportunities for bribe taking are most likely to arise when the government (principle) is imperfectly...

The negative correlation between resource endowments and GDP growth remains one of the most robust findings in the empirical growth literature, and has been coined the “resource curse hypothesis”. The policy consequences of this result are potentially far reaching. If natural resources are...

This paper examines the reasons why corruption and policy distortions tend to exhibit a high degree of persistence in certain regimes. We identify circumstances under which a firm seeks to evade regulations by (1) bribing of local inspectors, and (2) lobbying high-level government politicians to...