This paper examines the relationship between trade liberalisation and migration in the case of Mexico. The increasing bilateral trade between Mexico and the United States after signing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was supposed to stem the illegal Mexican migration flow by...

The IPAT-model developed by Ehrlich and Holdren is widespread in ecological economics in order to quantify the impact of population growth on environmental deterioration. We comment on this model and extensions proposed by several authors from a theoretical and empirical point of view.

We use an experiment to explore how subjects learn to play against computers which are programmed to follow one of a number of standard learning algorithms. The learning theories are (unbeknown to subjects) a best response process, fictitious play, imitation, reinforcement learning, and a trial...

When designing incentives for a manager, the trade-off between insurance and a "good" allocation of effort across various tasks is often identified with a trade-off between the responsiveness (sensitivity, precision, signal-noise ratio) of the performance measure and its similarity (congruity,...

The performance of market based environmental regulation is affected by patents and vice versa. This interaction is studied for a new type of innovation where new technologies reduce emissions of a specific pollutant but at the same time cause a new type of damage. A robust finding is that the...

In this paper, we investigate the external effects of the parent's decisions on the number of newly born children and the firm's decisions on the amount of polluting emissions that occur in industrial production. We employ an optimal control model which comprises three stock variables...

Population growth is often viewed as a most oppressive global problem with respect to environmental deterioration, but the relationships between population development, economic dynamics and environmental pollution are complex due to various feedback mechanisms. We analyze society’s economic...

Financial intermediaries may increase economic efficiency through intertemporal risk smoothing. However without an adequate regulation, intermediation may fail to do this. This paper studies the effects of a production shock in a closed economy and compares abilities of market-based and...

Banking regulators often practice forbearance and ambiguity in insolvency resolutions. The paper examines the effects of regulatory forbearance and ambiguity in a context of allocational efficiency. Bailouts, liquidations and their stochastic policy mix lead to suboptimal allocations if banks do...

We examine a situation where efforts on different tasks positively affect production but are not separately verifiable and where the manager (principal) and the worker (agent) have different ideas about how production should be carried out: agents prefer a less efficient way of production. We...