We analyze the effects of free trade on environmental policies in a strategic setting withtransboundary pollution. Trade liberalization can result in a race to the bottom in environmentaloutcomes, making both countries worse off. With command and control policies(quotas), there is no race to the...

The welfare dominance of ad valorem taxes over unit taxes in a single-market Cournot oligopoly is well-known. This article extends the analysis to multi-market oligopoly. Provided all ad valorem taxes are positive, unit costs are constant, firms are active in all considered markets, and a...

In this paper we relate the economics of labeling genetically modified (GM) products to thetheory of grading and minimum quality standards. The model represents three stages in thesupply chain (farm production, marketing handlers, and final users) and allows explicitly for theaccidental...

We explore connections between the certainty equivalent return (CER) functional and theunderlying utility function. Curvature properties of the functional depend upon how utilityfunction attributes relate to Hyperbolic Absolute Risk Aversion (HARA) type utility functions.If the CER functional is...

Taking location as given, we study imperfect competition on a circular city. In Bertrandoligopoly, we identify price harmonics as a function of firm unit costs and locations. The sumof oligopoly profits is larger when costs and/or locations are more dispersed in the ‘dihedralmajorization’...

Market concentration ratios are popular statistics for characterizing the extent of marketdominance in an imperfectly competitive market, but these ratios may not agree whencomparing two markets. Neither do they necessarily agree with the Herfindahl-Hirschman orentropy indices. This letter...

We develop a model with one innovating northern firm and heterogeneous southernfirms that compete in a final product market. We assume southern firms differ in their intrinsiccosts and their ability to adapt technology and study southern incentives to protect intellectualproperty rights. We find...

Our context involves Cournot oligopolists producing NM products at constant marginal costs when preferences are quasi-linear. We identify relationships between second moments of unit costs and second moments of firm-level production. For example, a larger variance in unit costs of a product...

This paper considers competition between two multinationals (U, J) who compete in a third market (K).The multinationals have similar cost structures, but differ in that J comes from a country that is “culturallysimilar” to K, and hence produces products that match more closely the...

When adjustment costs are present, cyclical preference and technology heterogeneities in aproduct’s markets induce cycles in production. We exploit cyclic and dihedral groupinvariances in an industry’s cost technology to describe these patterns. We show whenequilibrium cyclical pricing and...