Software platforms are a critical component of the computer systems underpinning leading? edge products ranging from third? generation mobile phones to video games. After describing some key economic features of computer systems and software platforms, the paper presents case studies of personal...

Two decades have passed since the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 launched a grand experiment in market-based environmental policy: the SO2 cap-and-trade system. That system performed well but created four striking ironies. First, by creating this system to reduce SO2 emissions to curb acid...

This essay provides an overview of the major emissions trading programs of the past thirty years on which significant documentation exists, and draws a number of important lessons for future applications of this environmental policy instrument. References to a larger number of other emissions...

Recent empirical contributions in labor economics suggest that individual firms face upward sloping labor supplies. We rationalize this by assuming that diosyncratic non-pecuniary conditions interact with money wages in workers' decisions to work for specific firms. Likewise, firms supply...

It is not so long ago that policy makers thought that excessive regional disparities would disappear automatically in the long run. Arbitrage possibilities arising from competition and factor mobility were expected to induce a more than average growth performance in lagging regions. Having the...

In a world of globalisation, it is tempting to foresee the 'death of distance' and, once the impediments to mobility have declined sufficiently, to wait for the predictions of the neo-classical theory of factor mobility to materialise. According to this theory, production factors respond to...

We study how the supply of environmentalism, which is defined by psychic benefits (costs) associated with the purchase of high-environmental (low-environmental) qualities, affects the way firms choose their products and the ensuing consequences for the global level of pollution. Contrary to...

The recent availability of trade data at a firm-product-country level calls for a new generation of models able to exploit the large variability detected across observations. By developing a model of monopolistic competition in which varieties enter preferences non-symmetrically, we show how...

By its very nature, transport is linked to trade. Trade being one of the oldest human activities, the transport of commodities is, therefore, a fundamental ingredient of any society. People get involved in trade because they want to consume goods that are not produced within reach. The Silk Road...