We examine how diversification of projects assigned to an agency can enhance efficiency by informing a principal of the agency’s quality. Projects that appear inefficient in isolation may be justified when assigned to the same agency. Assigning different tasks to different special purpose...

Central governments often subsidize capital spending by local governments, instead of subsidizing operating expenses or labor-intensive projects. This paper offers one explanation, focusing on the incentive effects for local officials. a local official can more easily shift the cost of...

In this paper we study how trip chaining affects the pricing and equilibrium number of firms. We use a monopolistic competition model where firms offer differentiated products as well as differentiated jobs to households who are all located at some distance from the firms. Trip chaining means...

This paper offers a stylized model in which an agency is in charge of investing in road capacity and maintain it but cannot use the capital market so that the only sources of funds are the toll revenues. We call this the strict self-financing constraint in opposition to the traditional self...

A partial equilibrium model for the urban transport market is described. The urban transport market is represented as a set of interrelated transport submarkets, one per type of mode or vehicle and period. This allows to represent in detail the different external costs associated with the use of...

We study duopolistic pricing by ports that are congestible and that share a downstream, congestible transport network with other users in their respective hinterlands. In the central set-up, local (country) governments care about local welfare only and decide on the capacity of the port and of...

In the course of 2006, Gazprom sharply increased gas prices for Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia and Moldova. This paper assesses (i) to what extent Europe is vulnerable to similar use of market power by Russia, and (ii) to what extent the construction of strategic gas storage could help Europe to...

The paper analyses the strategic environmental policy choices of governments for the car market. We consider two countries that each have a small number of car producers who sell cars at home and abroad, there are cross border pollution externalities and cross border R&D externalities. Each...

The purpose of this paper is to compare the interaction between pricing and capacity decisions on simple serial and parallel transport networks. When individual links of the network are operated by different regional or national authorities, toll and capacity competition is likely to result....