We argue five main propositions. Firstly, the choice between royalties and profit-based taxation involves an efficiency trade-off, between diminished incentives to produce output on one hand, and diminished incentives to minimize costs on the other (as in Laffont and Tirole 1993). So the Brown...

The 'Henry tax review', Australia's Future Tax System (2010), recommended that royalties be abolished and replaced by a resource rent tax. Regarding abolition, AFTS drew on KPMG Econtech (2010a), a report commissioned by Treasury to investigate the efficiencies of a wide range of Australian...

The Australian Treasury contracted KPMG Econtech (2010) to estimate the efficiency cost of Australian taxes, using the MM900 Computable General Equilibrium model. The resultant report, endorsed by Treasury, was a major input into the Henry report into AustraliaÂ’s Future Tax System (AFTS) and...

Institutional design focuses on the task of providing accountability and effective monitoring of decision-making by bodies vested with the coercive powers of the state in a context where information is inherently limited, costly to acquire and asymmetrically distributed. This paper focuses on...

Standard approaches to estimating the cost of capital are vulnerable to two errors when applied to sunk assets subject to economic regulation. First, investors in sunk assets usually have a valuable ability to delay commitment which is therefore an opportunity cost of investment. Second,...

A vertically integrated firm that wholesales to its retail rivals can, if it has sufficient market power, set the margin between its retail and wholesale prices so as to harm its rivals. Conventionally, an imputation test is used to determine whether such behavior is being undertaken. Such tests...

Requiring developing countries to adopt competition laws has become a standard element in Free Trade Agreements between those countries and developed countries, and in the check list of measures sought by the World Bank and other multilateral institutions. However, there is little reason to...

Requiring developing countries to adopt competition laws has become a standard element in Free Trade Agreements between those countries and developed countries, and in the ‘check list’ of measures sought by the World Bank and other multilateral institutions. However, there is little reason...