This paper discusses how an industrialized country could defend the wages and social benefits of its unskilled workers against wage competition from immigrants. It shows that fixing social standards harms the workers and that fixing social replacement incomes implies migration into unemployment....

Foreign direct investment has been disappointingly low in eastern Europe, which has been reluctant to make existing assets available to foreign investors. To mitigate any such resentment, we propose a participation model in which foreign investors compete for joint venture contracts. Host...

This note generalizes the Solow-Stiglitz efficiency condition for natural resources to the problem of fossil fuel extraction with a greenhouse effect. The generalized optimality condition suggests that the greenhouse effect implies overextraction in the sense of leaving future generations a...

While the old systems competition took place with closed borders, globalisation has brought about a new type of systems competition that is driven by the mobility of factors of production. The new systems competition will likely imply the erosion of the European welfare state, induce a race to...

This articles reviews the arguments for consumer protection policies by the government by referring to the Nobel prices on asymmetric information problems. It discusses criteria for assessing the empirical importance of lemons goods and comments on the relative merits of quality constraints and...

The article advances the hypothesis that Germany is unable to increase its gains from trade despite increasing trading volumes. High and rigid German wages largely result from the minimum wage constraint imposed by a welfare state that offers generous replacement incomes. Confronted by low-wage...

Despite its efforts and obligations under the Kyoto Protocol, the EU has not succeeded in even making a dent in the rapidly rising trend of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions. If anything, the trend has accelerated in recent years. In his Thünen Lecture given to the Verein für Socialpolitik in...