In this paper we evaluate the financial performance of virtually all of the branch offices of a large European savings bank for a recent six-month accounting period. We employ a complementary pair of nonparametric techniques to evaluate their financial performance, in terms of their ability to...

In essence, any international environmental agreement (IEA) implies cooperation of a form or another. The paper seeks for logical foundations of this. It first deals with how the need for cooperation derives from the public good aspect of the externalities involved, as well as with where the...

In this paper we test empirically with the Nordhaus and Yang (1996) RICE model the core property of the transfer scheme advocated by Germain, Toint and Tulkens (1997). This scheme is designed to sustain full cooperation in a voluntary internationalenvironmental agreement by making all countries...

International environmental agreements aiming at correcting negative externalities generated by transboundary pollution are difficult to achieve for many reasons. Important obstacles arise from asymmetry in costs and benefits, and instability may occur due to the fact that coalitions of...

Calling upon both positive and normative economics, we attempt to characterize the issues at stake in the current international negotiations on climatic change. We begin (Section 2) by reviewing the main features of the Protocol. Then (Section 3), we identify by means of an elementary economic...

Musgravian externalities, formulated and illustrated by Musgrave in a 1966 paper on "social goods" are seen in this paper as one form of the interactions that occur between the components of a federation. The original formal apparatus is first exposed briefly. In that context, it is then...

It is well known that the transnational character of many environmental problems requires cooperation amongst the countries involved, if a social optimum is at all to be achieved. Most of the numerous contributions dealing with the problems raised by the cooperation issue bear only on pollutants...

This article deals with cooperation issues in international pollution problems in a two di- mensional dynamic framework implied by the accumulation of the pollutant and of the capital goods. Assuming that countries do reevaluate at each period the advantages to cooperate or not given the current...

This article deals with cooperation issues in international pollution problems in a two dimensional dynamic framework implied by the accumulation of the pollutant and of the capital goods. Assuming that countries do reevaluate at each period the advantages to cooperate or not given the current...

Using an updated version of the CWS model (introduced by Eyckmans and Tulkens in Resource and Energy Economics 2003), this paper intends to evaluate with numbers the respective merits of two competing notions of coalition stability in the standard global public goods model as customarily applied...