Regional integration agreements are examples of second-best policies and have an ambiguous impact on welfare. This article builds a model in which regional integration agreements unambiguously raise welfare by correcting for externalities. It assumes that trade between neighboring countries...

This paper explores a world in which regional trade agreements help reduce security tensions between neighbors.Regional integration agreements (RIAs) are examples of second best and have an ambiguous impact on welfare, contend Schiff and Winters.They build a model in which RIAs unambiguously...

Democratic countries with substantial inequality and where people believe that success depends on connections and luck induce political support for high tax rates and generous welfare states. Traditional wisdom is that such policies harm the economy, but there is not much evidence that countries...

We study the optimal trade policy against a foreign oligopoly withendogenous quality. We show that, under the Most Favoured Nation(MFN) clause, a uniform tariff policy is always welfare improvingover the free trade equilibrium. However, a nonuniform tariff policyis always desirable on welfare...

In studying congestion tolling, it is important to account for heterogeneity in preferences of drivers, as ignoring it can bias the welfare gains. We analyse the effects of tolling, in the bottleneck model, with continuous heterogeneity in the value of time and schedule delay. The welfare gain...

We welfare rank different types of second-best environmental policy. The focus is on the roles of uncertainty and public finance. The setup is the basic stochastic neoclassical growth model augmented with the assumptions that pollution occurs as a by-product of output produced and environmental...

This paper explores the interactions between congestion pricing and a tax-distorted labor market within a monocentric urban equilibrium model. We compute the efficiency gains of various second-best policies, i.e. combinations of toll schemes and revenue recycling programs, with a predetermined...

This paper uses a novel GPS-coded dataset for more than three million car trips in the four largest German cities to measure the efficiency losses from using uniform fuel taxes as a second-best optimal tax to reduce traffic congestion. We estimate the short-run price elasticity of...