Concerns have been expressed that in a global market place with mobile capital, national governments will have incentives to set weak environmental policies (“environmental dumpingâ€) to protect the international competitiveness of their domestic firms, that these incentives are...

We address two concerns: trade liberalisation may lead to a race-to-the bottom in environmental standards; supra-national agencies, who might overcome this, may be captured by special interest groups. This raises two sets of choices: whether to set environmental policy at the national or...

In Ulph (2002) I analysed how the possibility of future resolution of uncertainty about damage costs affected the incentives and timing for countries to join a self-enforcing international environmental agreement (IEA). I analysed two membership rules – fixed (countries commit whether to...

In this paper, we develop a model of advertising in a differentiated duopoly in which firms first decide how much to invest in cooperative or predatory advertising and then engage in product market competition (Cournot or Bertrand). We then use this model, with endogenously determined type of...

A number of countries have recently introduced legislation which holds polluters liable for the costs of cleaning up environmental damage they have caused. While in principle this gives polluters appropriate incentives to reduce the risk of environmental damage, these incentives are weakened if...

I analyse how the possibility of future resolution of uncertainty about damage costs affects incentives to join a self-enforcing international environmental agreement. Unlike earlier literature, the model allows many countries, uses a solution concept which does not restrict the size of a stable...

Disputes over national product standards are a major source of tension in international trade negotiations. The usual pattern is that exporters challenge new product standards as a `disguised barrier to trade.' The paper develops a two-country political agency model of standard setting. It is...

A key prediction of a large class of theoretical models is that the location of economic activity is not necessarily determined by fundamentals. To test the empirical relevance of these ideas requires a natural experiment in which a large but ultimately temporary shock dislocates economic...

This paper develops a quantitative model of city structure to separate agglomeration forces, dispersion forces and fundamentals as determinants of location choices. The model remains tractable and amenable to empirical analysis because of stochastic shocks to worker productivity, which yield a...