After many years of an impasse in attempts to introduce Regulatory Impact Assessment to Greece the Greek Prime Minister announced in July of 2006 the introduction of a very ambitious Integrated Impact Assessment on the economy, the society and the environment. The model presented was at the same...

Despite all of the talk about deregulation' of the electricity sector, a large number of non-market mechanisms have been imposed on emerging competitive wholesale and retail markets. These mechanisms include spot market price caps, operating reserve requirements, non-price rationing protocols,...

Despite the popularity of price cap regulation in practice, the economic literature provides relatively little guidance on how to determine the X factor, which is the rate at which inflation -adjusted output prices must fall under price cap plans. We review the standard principles that inform...

This paper presents a theoretical and empirical investigation of tax competition when voters use the tax policy of neighboring jurisdictions as information to evaluate the performance of their incumbent politicians. We show that this has implications both for voter tolerance of high taxes and...

This paper considers the role of incentive based climate adaptation policies. It uses the early literature on pricing and capacity choices under demand uncertainty to describe how revised price structures for the substitutes for climate services can be treated as anticipatory adaptation. In many...

We report results from a large field experiment that with a few hours prior notice provided Danish residential consumers with dynamic price and environmental signals aimed at causing them to shift their consumption either into or away from certain hours of the day. The same marginal price signal...

We use a regression discontinuity design to examine students' responses to the negative incentive brought on by being placed on academic probation. Consistent with a model of introducing performance standards in which agents respond differently based on ability, we find that being placed on...

Successful innovation is essential for the survival and growth of organizations but how best to incentivize innovation is poorly understood. We compare how two common incentive schemes affect innovative performance in a field experiment run in partnership with a large life sciences company. We...

High and increasing hospital prices have led to calls for price regulation. If prices are high because of consolidation, regulating prices could enhance welfare. However, high prices could also reflect increased willingness to pay by privately insured consumers for clinical and non-clinical...

In the last ten to fifteen years financial derivative securities have become an important, and controversial, product for commercial banks. The controversy concerns whether the size, complexity, and risks associated with these securities, the difficulties with accurately reporting timely...