Unilateral second-best carbon taxes are analysed in a two-period, two-country model with international trade in final goods, oil and bonds. Acceleration of global warming resulting from a future carbon tax is large if the price elasticities of oil demand are large and that of oil supply is...

The fact that according to the celebrated Coase theorem rational parties always try to exploit all gains from trade is usually taken as an argument against the necessity of government intervention through Pigouvian taxation in order to correct externalities. We show that the hold-up problem,...

We analyse how, in representative democracies, income distribution influences the stringency of environmental policy and economic growth. Individuals (who differ in abilities) live for two periods, working when young and owning capital when old. Externalities are caused by a polluting factor....

We revisit the question of the efficiency of individual decisions to be protected against crime for the cases of both observable and unobservable protection. We obtain that observable protection is unambiguously associated with a negative externality and that at the individual level, it has a...

When today’s actions can affect tomorrow's value of an asset and when the principal does not have access to hard information, either about productive activity or monitoring activity, two incentive problems must be simultaneously solved: first, the ‘ex-ante’ moral hazard problem of inducing...

Two aspects of systemic risk, the risk that banks fail together, are modeled and their interaction examined. First, the ex-post aspect, in which the failure of a bank brings down a surviving bank as well, and second, the ex-ante aspect, in which banks endogenously hold correlated portfolios...

As the costs of generating and transmitting information fall, the main bottlenecks in communication networks are becoming the human receivers, who are overloaded with information. For networks of targeted communication, this paper discusses the meaning of information overload, provides a...

We introduce labour market imperfections (i.e. unions and the existence of a wage floor) in a finance-constrained monetary economy with heterogenous agents and increasing returns to scale due to labour and capital productive externalities. We find that indeterminacy emerges for empirically...

This paper proposes a model to shed light on two important policy features of privatization in Central and Eastern Europe: the idea of a necessary critical mass of privatization on the one hand, and the difficulties encountered in the actual privatization process on the other, related to the...

Is entrepreneurial talent entirely innate or do people learn to become entrepreneurs? We extend Lucas's (1978) model of entrepreneurship to allow for the possibility that entrepreneurial talents may be acquired by watching other entrepreneurs in action. This model implies that areas with a...