In this paper we investigate how restrictions for emission trading to the energy-intensive power sector will affect the magnitude and distribution of abatement costs across EU countries vis-à-vis a comprehensive EU emission trading regime. We find that emission trading between European power...

We study auction design when parties cannot commit to the mechanism. The seller may change the rules of the game any number of times and the buyers may choose their outside option at any stage of the game. A dynamic consistency condition and an optimality condition property are defined to...

We say that a society has a weak norm against lying if, all other things being equal, agents rather lie in such a way that they do not get caught. We show that if this is the case, and it usually is, then Bayesian monotonicity is no longer a constraint in implementation and all incentive...

There are over 180 ILO conventions in many areas of labour law, industrial relations and social security, but they are not ratified universally: for the conventions adopted between 1975 and 1995, the cumulated probability of ratification is about 13 per cent ten years after their adoption. In...

In this paper, I argue that religion matters for the emergence of democracies and dictatorships. Religion is defined as a stochastically set demand for public goods. Different types of religious collectives reflect different tradeoffs between centralized resource distribution and market rewards....

Despite the truthful dominant strategy, participants in strategy-proof me- chanisms submit manipulated preferences. In our model, participants dislike rejections and enjoy the confirmation from getting what they declared most desirable. Formally, the payoff from a match decreases in its position...

We assess the influence of moneyed interests on legislative decisions. Our theory predicts that the vote outcome distribution and donation flows in a legislature feature a discontinuity at the approval threshold of bills if special interest groups are involved in vote buying. Testing the...

Why do politicians sometimes pursue policies with uncertain outcomes? We present a model in which politicians are unable to pre-commit to a status quo policy, and where investors and voters face a conflict over the division of output. Politicians may deviate from the status quo and pursue risky...

Extensive evidence suggests that participants in the direct student-proposing deferred-acceptance mechanism (DSPDA) play dominated strategies. In particular, students with low priority tend to misrepresent their preferences for popular schools. To explain the observed data, we introduce...