The purpose of this paper is to study tax competition on a parallel road network when different governments have tolling authority on the different links of the network. Reflecting many current situations in Europe, each link is used by both local and transit traffic; moreover, transit has a...

Governments may be hindered in setting taxes on markets in which the consumer can choose to consume the good but not pay the tax. An example is urban on-street parking. If government attempts to ration demand to supply via a peak-load fee, but fails to invest in costly enforcement, drivers park...

We consider an environmental enforcement agency who uses the measurement of ambient pollution to guide its inspections of individual polluters. We compare two different uses of this information. In a first model, the agency uses a ``threshold strategy": if ambient pollution exceeds an endogenous...

Environmental inspection agencies have limited resources. A natural response to this shortage of resources is targeting. The agency will inspect the firms it suspects to be noncompliant. This targeting policy leads to higher compliance than random inspections. This paper uses individual...

This paper looks at the potential effect of partial ownership on the generation and the transmission sector of electricity markets. Ideally, in liberalized electricity markets, transmission is separated form generation. The transmission sector is a natural monopoly operated by a regulated...

In this paper we study the policy interactions between meeting a greenhouse gas emission constraint and local air pollution policies. We use a partial equilibrium model of a national energy market to address three questions. First what is the greenhouse gas emission reduction one can expect if...

Abstract: This paper derives the socially optimal transmission prices in a congested electricity network when there is imperfect competition in generation, and when the budget constraint of the network operator is binding. The results which we derive are a generalization of the standard Ramsey...

A small region has a high cost monopolistic electricity generator. It is connected through a low capacity transmission line with a large, competitive low cost region. Access to the transmission line is auctioned. I show that, if consumers arbitrate on the regional price differences, the...

Using the case study of water pollution in the Flemish textile industry, we discuss three empirical questions concerning the use of emission standards. We find that the Becker result ("maximal fine / minimal inspection") does not hold if we include rule making, implementation and enforcement...

In this paper we investigate emission trading within the EU and, more specifically, some proposals to impose ceilings on emission trading. We compare different proposals put forward by the EU negotiators at the international level in the framework of the Kyoto Protocol and apply them to intra-EU...